How medical misogyny is letting women down

It is no secret that women have long been subject to inadequate – or even dangerous – forms of healthcare. But even in an era of space travel, artificial intelligence, and self-driving cars, women’s healthcare is still well behind men’s.

Women face a variety of health difficulties throughout the course of their lives, including (but not limited to) periods, pregnancy, and the menopause. Many struggle to receive the care they need, and face a great deal of stigma along the way.

Women left behind

Put simply, women’s healthcare is just not where it should be. This is not because we lack the resources or funding to improve it, but because of where they are being allocated. Only 2% of UK medical research funding goes towards women’s health issues, with erectile dysfunction alone receiving five times more funding than premenstrual syndrome – despite affecting a much smaller percentage of the population.

Women’s health being excluded from medical research is nothing new. The US has a decades-long history of excluding women – particularly women of colour – from clinical trials, and there are 67% more male-only clinical trials than female-only in the UK. Women of colour remain particularly vulnerable to being overlooked, not just because of medical misogyny but also due to how pervasive racism in medicine continues to be.

In addition to making up 80% of autoimmune disease patients, women are more predisposed to mental conditions such as anxiety and depression. The fact that there is such a disparity between the sexes should mean that there is more funding spent to understand this, not less. Melinda French Gates has pledged fifty million dollars to women’s health research, which begs the question: Why are we relying on the generosity of a billionaire to patch holes in a clearly broken system that is abandoning women?

The threat posed to women by medical misogyny is a deep-rooted and complex one. Women undergoing surgery are significantly more likely to experience complications, and even die, when the surgeon is a man as opposed to a woman. This is in conjunction with the fact that surgeons are overwhelmingly male, with fewer than a fifth of surgeons being female. The systemic issue of gender inequality in medicine thus trickles down to individual women, each suffering the consequences of much broader injustice.

Contraception: complications and control

A common issue for women is the struggle to find the right contraception. The birth control pill needs to be taken at the same time every day in order to be completely effective, while long-term birth control options have their own issues. Women opting for the IUD often find the process incredibly painful, and this coupled with the fact that they are not always offered pain relief during the process makes the IUD an intimidating option for many. Other forms of long-term birth control such as the implant are also invasive in some way, making reliable contraception a complicated and often frustrating issue for women everywhere.

Many women find that forgoing contraception and getting tubal ligation is no easy feat, either. One woman in the UK fought for a decade before she was able to have the procedure, and the situation in the US is even worse. Women seeking sterilisation are often required to get their husband’s signature, and single women are even denied sterilisation on the grounds that their future husbands may want children.

Women who are already dealing with a healthcare system inadequately equipped to treat them should not have to put up with their bodily autonomy being challenged by sexist and outdated attitudes.

Shame and stigma

Women’s bodies and reproductive health remain heavily stigmatised and politicised, and a significant number of women and girls experience shame and guilt as a result. From 2023-2024 only 68.8% of those eligible for a cervical screening were adequately screened. That leaves almost a third of women especially vulnerable to cervical cancer.

Among the primary reasons for avoiding a screening are embarrassment, and fear that it will hurt. Women are putting their health at risk because they do not feel comfortable and safe undergoing a medical examination, and considering how frequently female pain is ignored, their fears are not entirely unfounded.

Countless women have experienced their symptoms being dismissed by medical professionals. It is common for women to be told that the pain they are feeling is normal, or that the problem is mental, rather than physical. Women who have been dismissed time and time again, who are struggling with severe pain, find that they do, in fact, have a serious problem that requires urgent treatment.

This systemic gaslighting of women is inexcusable. These are not isolated incidents, but are part of a longstanding pattern of medical misogyny. It was not a million years ago that women could be deemed mad by doctors and thrown into asylums for “hysteria”. Have we truly progressed so little from those dark days that women are still being told that their suffering is all in their heads?

With the term “geriatric pregnancy” having only recently been eschewed, and “incompetent cervix” still going strong, it can feel like some aspects of medicine have not progressed very much at all.

Childbirth and misogynoir

Bringing a new life into the world is a magical thing. But despite all the progress that’s been made, childbirth remains an incredibly dangerous time in a woman’s life. Maternal mortality is a serious issue all around the globe, with over a quarter of a million women dying as a result of pregnancy and childbirth in 2023 alone. In the UK, while many women give birth safely, the statistics are still shocking.

Black women in the UK are over four times more likely to die in childbirth than white women, and the situation in the US is no better. There is simply no good reason why women of colour should be in this much danger when giving birth. The risk extends to their babies as well – compared to babies born to white women, babies with black mothers are 81% more likely to die in neonatal care. There is a clear and consistent trend of Black women and their babies suffering much, much higher mortality rates than any other demographic.

This is no coincidence. Dangerous misinformation regarding Black people’s bodies is still alarmingly pervasive, with a 2016 study revealing a number of medical students in the US still believed myths such as Black people having thicker skin. Black women in the UK have opened up about being denied pain relief, and are met with both racism and misogyny as they seek relief from their pain.

It therefore comes as no surprise that the US is seeing an increase in women of colour opting for home births, in an effort to better protect themselves and their babies. Dealing with everything from ignorance to outright callousness, they have good reason to turn away from traditional hospital births, and towards a more unorthodox method that gives them more control over their childbirth experiences.

The fact that they are faced with this choice is emblematic of how women of colour are being let down en masse by their healthcare systems.

Periods and menopause

Despite periods being a significant part of the average woman’s life, there is not enough support for women dealing with difficult periods, and conditions such as endometriosis and dysmenorrhea. Only this year polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) was renamed to polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS). Despite being a relatively common condition, progress has been painfully slow in fully understanding its effects on the body.

Endometriosis is a very painful condition that affects around 10% of women worldwide. It is also notorious for how long it can take to be diagnosed – in the UK, women have to wait almost a decade on average. That means years of debilitating pain that interferes with work and daily life, all the while being repeatedly dismissed by doctors. Even wealthy and famous women spend years attempting to get a diagnosis. It would seem that no woman is safe from the misogyny that permeates healthcare systems around the globe.

A lesser known condition many women might not even realise exists is premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), which can be severe enough to cause suicidal thoughts. Women with this condition experience overwhelming cyclical patterns of mood swings, and this makes daily life and maintaining relationships enormously difficult.

There are a whole host of conditions that make periods a recurring monthly nightmare for so many women, and as the government has made it clear there are no plans to introduce menstrual leave, they are left unsupported.

As their periods cease, women find themselves thrown out of the frying pan and into the fire as they begin to tackle the menopause. Menopause increases the risk of health problems such as heart disease and osteoporosis, and can have a serious effect on mental health as well. Two-thirds of women going through the menopause were found to be struggling with their mental health, as they navigated symptoms such as brain fog and difficulty sleeping.

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Women who are struggling financially are hit especially hard by the menopause. The majority of working women going through the menopause feel it is negatively affecting their work, and the number of women who had quit their jobs because of it was recorded at almost a million in 2021. Considering how many people in Britain are unable to retire, and are instead working into their seventies, a lot of women are forced to work while struggling with a litany of mental and physical symptoms.

With the state pension age already at 66 and set to rise in the near future, some women find themselves in the impossible position of being unable to work, but receiving inadequate medical support and benefits. I spoke to Sam, a woman in her early sixties, who found that her chronic pain had worsened significantly after the menopause, and who is struggling to receive the medical and financial support she needs.

“[Menopause] hit me like a thunderbolt”, she told me. Like many, she was denied PIP, receiving zero points despite the debilitating pain she experiences on a daily basis. “[It] was hopeless, they didn’t want to know.”

She is not alone in this, but is one of countless women who find themselves dealing with health and financial difficulties without the help they deserve.

So many women, in so many different circumstances all around the world, find themselves being let down by healthcare professionals who are supposed to be doing everything they can to help. There is no justification for medical misogyny, nor for the ignorance and stigma that women have to face every single day.

Women make up half the human population, and should not be treated as a cryptic offshoot of the male “default”. They deserve respect, healthcare, and they deserve to be heard.