Before delving into the multifaceted gender biases in healthcare and medical research, we need to begin by understanding what gender bias is.
Gender bias itself is the favouritism towards a certain gender or prejudice against a certain gender. It can be conscious, with purposeful prejudice/ favoritism towards a gender, or unconscious/implicit bias, meaning it is unintentional due to a person’s upbringing, traditions, or culture. In the context of healthcare, gender bias affects doctors’ interpretation of women’s symptoms and thus affects the final diagnosis, resulting in a misdiagnosis or even complete dismissal of the symptoms.
It is important to mention that although this article focuses on how gender bias affects women in healthcare, men also face gender bias in healthcare (expected to be brave and not struggle mentally or physically). One of the ways that women experience healthcare bias is the misperception of chronic pain. Women with chronic pain, or even with pain as a symptom in general, often have their pain interpreted as psychological in cause and told they are just hysterical or anxious, going as far as being told that they are just hypochondriacs or drug seekers. This happens especially in a condition like endometriosis that causes severe pain, and is often ignored with some women being told they are ‘too young’ to possibly have it. This constant ignorance and dismissal may lead those women to undergo a hysterectomy, or may even develops into cancer for some women, albeit rarely. Another example is ovarian cysts, with the constant dismissal of symptoms resulting in them advancing so much that the cysts rupture, ending in the removal of one or both ovaries if severe enough.
In the cases that female pain isn't completely ignored, women are just prescribed painkillers that might not even be effective, and if they attempt to obtain better pain killers their request might be refused, being prescribed therapy instead on the assumption of their pain being psychosomatic. In some cases, they might even be labeled as drug seekers. Another way in which women’s pain is dismissed is when it comes to cancer diagnosis, with one woman told she was being dramatic when complaining of chronic headaches and requesting a brain scan, only to find out she has a brain tumor.
Furthermore, women’s symptoms are sometimes chalked up to their weight, with a woman recounting her experience of how doctors told her repeatedly to just lose weight in response to her multitude of symptoms that began with bronchitis, walking pneumonia, and worsened to fits of coughing up blood the longer she was dismissed, and only after an extreme coughing fit was her bronchial tube tumor discovered, which had already spread, costing her her entire left lung. Another woman on reddit said that she was told that the tumor in her neck which was continuously growing in size was just a fatty cyst ‘due to her weight’, and that it will disappear when she loses weight, only for it to end up being a cancer that had possibly already spread to her lymph nodes when her doctor decided to run tests, after it didn't disappear despite her weight loss.
This gender bias against women in healthcare doesn't just stop at symptoms and diagnoses, it also extends to research, as it wasn’t even until 1990 that the National Institutes of Health required researchers to include women in clinical trials sponsored by it. Despite this, there are still disparities in conducting research and adequate funding of diseases that mainly affect men and those that affect women, with diseases that affect women receiving less funding, that isn’t proportional to the burden of their diseases, with the example of ovarian cancer ranking 5th for lethality, but 12th in terms of it’s funding to lethality ratio.
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