The National Business Review pointed last week to work by Andrea Ichino and Enrico Moretti on gender differences in absenteeism that seems utterly to vindicate Thompson's position. For readers abroad, a representative of the Employers and Manufacturer's Association was goaded in a TV interview into speculating about reasons for male-female wage differences. Among the more sensible and usual reasons - time out of the workforce, experience and so on - he noted some of his members had found higher rates of sick leave among female employees and speculated about whether menstrual cycles were to blame. [note: this is what I gather from an assortment of press reporting on the interviews, which I haven't seen]
You can guess what's happened since.
The National Business Review took the opportunity though of highlighting Ichino and Moretti's work suggesting that 28-day cycles in female sick leave are due to menstrual cycles and that increased work absence due to said cycles are responsible for a minor but significant part of the wage gap. The paper came out in one of the new AEA policy journals in 2009; here's an ungated working version. The paper's since been criticized by Rockoff and Herrmann; I'm not about to invest the time in sorting out who's right on this one.
But I love that somebody at NBR likely ran a Google Scholar search to see whether there was any lit to back up Thompson's ill-advised off the cuff remarks. That's a few notches above the rest of the media who just focused on the obviously correct point that you can't say what Thompson said in Thompson's position. Whether Thompson's remark was true is unfortunately second order relative to that some things just can't be said. I like that NBR took a bit of time to do some checking.
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