The gender data gap in medicine & its fatal consequences.

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Imagine going to the doctor’s, in the search for help with a pressing health issue – only to get ignored, shut down, invalidated, or perhaps worse, given the completely wrong medication or treatment.

Caroline Criado Perez’s book Invisible Women brings to light the data gap in our world that so blatantly prevails when it comes to women in our world. Perez reveals how the majority of our data is biased, with only men being taken into account in far too many cases, and how women have to face the consequences of this, whether it be by experiencing irritating inconveniences or suffering disastrous outcomes. Chapter 10 of Invisible Women, ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’, exposes the problem of the gender data gap in medical care.

Women have been particularly overlooked in healthcare ever since it has come into existence, and the issue seemingly continues to haunt the healthcare industry to this day. A core reason for this can be found in the concept of the ‘default male body’, which essentially takes on the assumption that all human bodies can be categorised into one default – and this default is male. This ‘default male body’ has existed for fundamentally all of human medical history, even up to the present day. For example the ancient Greeks saw female bodies as mutilated versions of male bodies. They were male bodies “‘turned outside in’”. It has inevitably, of course, led to a bias that puts all women at an immediate disadvantage when it comes to healthcare.

Prestigious universities’ textbooks in 2008 used male bodies 3 times as much as female bodies when presenting supposedly “‘neutral’” parts of the body. Even in 2017, the underrepresentation of female bodies in book illustrations persisted. Studies have consistently found sex differences down to the body’s cells, though this is often disregarded in medical research.

Whilst this disproportion in medical representation between sexes may seem frustrating, it is certainly not of little consequence, either. Even though women are 70% more likely to suffer from depression compared to men, “animal studies on brain disorders are 5 times as likely to be done on male animals”. Not only are female animals excluded from studies, even into diseases that are female-heavy, but women are, too. Women make up “55% of HIV- positive adults in the developing world”, yet US HIV research found women making up merely 11.1% of participants in studies for cures.

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Lack of female representation in drug trials also means that the effects of these drugs being tested on women are often brushed over. For example, whilst drugs treating high blood pressure do, in fact, decrease male mortality from heart attack, they increase female mortality.

A devastating real-life experience highlights the destructive impacts of the systemic bias women must face in the healthcare sector. Michelle’s symptoms first started when she was 14, but only at the age of 26 did she finally receive a diagnosis of irritable bowel syndrome as well as ulcerative colitis. During the decade she suffered without a diagnosis or treatment, she was given aspirin, told to rest for a day, told her problems were in her head, and told she should be less anxious. Shockingly, this example does not seem to be a one-off. Instead, it is a consequence of a medical system rooted against women.

Appallingly, this just comes to show that the medical gender data gap that has been passed down through history is continuously damaging the lives of countless women today. Whether it is being marginalised in medical research, getting mistreated at the doctor’s office, or ending up in a life-or-death situation.

Indeed, Perez briefly notes that the ‘default male body’ does not even represent men fairly, let alone women. This raises questions on the soundness of medical research as a whole, with medicine and public health being issues that affect every person in the world. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ for all of humanity when it comes to health, so why is the world acting as if there is?

Source:

Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women (‘The Drugs Don’t Work’), 2019