Medical Myths About Gender Roles Go Back to Ancient Greece. Women Are Still Paying the Price Today

Gender difference is intimately stitched into the fabric of humanness. At every stage in its long history, medicine has absorbed and enforced socially constructed gender divisions. These divisions have traditionally ascribed power and dominance to men.

 Coronavirus Is Exposing How the Health Care System Neglects LGBTQ People

How discrimination, collective health problems, and limited access to doctors make LGBTQ communities especially vulnerable to COVID-19.

 How Doctors Gaslight Women into Doubting Their Own Pain

Maya Dusenbery’s book, "Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick," explains how women’s health issues have historically been dismissed—and what we can do about it now.

 How medicine discriminates against non-white people and women

Many devices and treatments work less well for them

 How Scrubs Reinforce Sexist Double Standards

Female doctors have always dealt with appearance-related confusion and disrespect. That only got worse during the pandemic.

 If AI is going to be the world’s doctor, it needs better textbooks

Imagine there was a simple test to see whether you were developing Alzheimer’s disease. You would look at a picture and describe it, software would assess the way you spoke, and based on your answer, tell you whether or not you had early-stage Alzheimer’s. It would be quick, easy, and over 90% accurate—except for you, it doesn’t work. That might be because you’re from Africa. Or because you’re from India, or China, or Michigan. Imagine most of the world is getting healthier because of some new technology, but you’re getting left behind.

 Medicine’s gender revolution: how women stopped being treated as ‘small men’

Until the turn of this century, there was little sense in Western medicine that gender mattered. Outside the niche of female reproductive medicine, the male body was the universal model for anatomy studies.

 Modern medicine still has much to learn about women’s bodies

Alongside her feminist history of illness, Elinor Cleghorn makes a plea for better listening.

 The bias that blinds: why some people get dangerously different medical care

Medical research and practice have long assumed a narrow definition of the ‘default’ human, badly compromising the care of anyone outside that category. How can this be fixed?

 The Pervasiveness Of Transgender Health Care Discrimination

Jesse Brace lives in Lawrence, Kan. Earlier this year, they spoke with reporter Jo Yurcaba about what it's been like trying to get medical care as a trans nonbinary person.

 Why are doctors more likely to ignore women's pain?

From understanding how they talk about pain to understanding the barriers that society places on them, it's time to take a hard look at why our health care system is failing women.

 Why ‘Unwell Women’ Have Gone Misdiagnosed for Centuries

In order to recognize illness, you have to know what health looks like — what’s normal, and what’s not. Until recently, medical research generally calibrated “normal” on a trim white male. Such a patient, arriving in an emergency room clutching his chest as they do in the movies — and in the textbooks — would be immediately evaluated for a heart attack. But heart disease in women, inconveniently, doesn’t always come with chest pain.

 Women Are Calling Out ‘Medical Gaslighting’

Research suggests that diagnostic errors occur in up to one out of every seven encounters between a doctor and patient, and that most of these mistakes are driven by the physician’s lack of knowledge. Women are more likely to be misdiagnosed than men in a variety of situations.

 Women suffer needless pain because almost everything is designed for men

Why women are 50 percent more likely to be misdiagnosed after a heart attack and 17 percent more likely to die in a car crash.

1 in 10 Women Have Endometriosis. Why Don't Their Doctors Believe Them?

In "Ask Me About My Uterus," Abby Norman exhaustively chronicles her years-long struggle to make doctors take her pain seriously—something everyone who suffers from endometriosis can sadly relate to.

The healthcare gender bias: do men get better medical treatment?

A study this month found that women are less likely than men to be given CPR – but it is not the only way in which they are given short shrift in an industry where female pain is serially misdiagnosed

The healthcare system thinks helping women is bad for business

In the broad collective movements of #MeToo, #equalpay, #TimesUp, #etc., one particular industry continues to resist our, well, #resistance: women’s healthcare. The field remains breathtakingly biased and uneven, and preposterously expensive.

A Fix for Gender Bias in Health Care? Check

In health care, gender disparities are especially pernicious. If you are a woman, studies have shown, you are not only less likely to receive blood clot prophylaxis, but you may also receive less intensive treatment for a heart attack.

A Fix For Gender-Bias In Animal Research Could Help Humans

Here's a big shift for the National Institutes of Health. The agency now requires biomedical studies to include female animals. This is a first. Leading scientists say research has historically skewed male, and that could mean we know a lot less about what drugs do in the female body

A Scientist's Gender Can Skew Research Results

The results of an IQ test can depend on the gender of the person who's conducting the test. Likewise, studies of pain medication can be completely thrown off by the gender of the experimenter. This underappreciated problem is one reason that some scientific findings don't stand the test of time.

Could femtech be the answer to the gender health gap?

The term ‘femtech’, short for female technology, was originally coined in 2016 by Ida Tin1 (co-founder and CEO of menstrual cycle tracking app Clue) and refers to software, diagnostic equipment and products that use technology to improve the health and lives of women.

Doctors Learn to be Sexist In Med School, and Female Patients Pay

"Your symptoms are assumed to be all in your head."

Medical Textbooks Overwhelmingly Use Pictures of Young White Men

Gray's Anatomy is still in print today, in its 41st edition, but if you open the book up and flip through the pages you might notice something. Or really, the dearth of something: women. And it turns out it's not just Gray's Anatomy that has this problem—almost all medical textbooks are heavily biased towards depicting male bodies.

The Doctor Doesn’t Listen to Her. But the Media Is Starting To

Physicians have long dismissed or downplayed women's sexual- and reproductive-health concerns—but in 2018, stories about "health-care gaslighting" are consistently breaking through to the mainstream.

The Inherent Inequality of Health Care for Women

One thing is clear: Given the inequalities that continue to exist with regard to health care, contraception access -- which, while provided to women, is indisputably applicable to both genders -- is just one part of the overall story.

Women have heart attacks too, but their symptoms are often dismissed as something else

Improving outcomes from heart disease in women will need a change not only in health professionals’ knowledge, attitudes and beliefs, but most importantly among women themselves. The first step for women to lower their risk is to get them to prioritise their own health, by increasing their knowledge of risk factors and symptoms particular to women

Women’s health is better when women have more control in their society

Living in societies that are more unequal is associated with negative health outcomes. Preferences for sons can cause neglect of daughters, which can lead to poor health and even death. What role, then, do gender norms play in subtler gender health disparities?