You might know about the gender pay gap, but have you heard about the gender health gap—or even the gender pain gap?
Despite all the progress we've made towards gender equality, women are still slipping through the cracks when it comes to one of the most important areas of our lives – our health. It's hard to believe that in today’s world, your gender can still hold you back from receiving the medical care you need and deserve.
Healthcare for women is uniquely influenced by our hormones, so it only makes sense that our care providers understand the extensive impacts hormones can have on our bodies, as well as the types of conditions that can only affect people with female reproductive organs.
But as we continue to experience gender bias, medical dismissal, and misdiagnoses, it becomes clear that these issues are deeply rooted in history and systemic inequality, leaving our experiences overlooked, our voices unheard, and our concerns dismissed.
The first step: understanding how we ended up in this mess.
History of the Gender Health Gap
The history of the gender health gap reads like a long, frustrating saga of misunderstanding and bias. It begins in ancient times when women’s health issues were either ignored or misinterpreted and stretches to the present day, where despite scientific progress, medical misogyny persists and women’s health concerns are still too often sidelined.
5th Century BC
Women = “Mutilated” Men: The Ancient Greeks deemed women as “mutilated”, “incomplete males,” who were biologically and intellectually inferior to men, and whose sole purpose was to bear and raise children.
4th Century BC
Wandering Womb Theory: Hippocrates and Plato believed that the reason women were so different from men was the result of our wandering wombs. Physicians believed that the uterus actually travelled through the body causing various ailments contributing to widespread misconceptions about women's health.
2nd Century AD
Early Mistakes, Long Shadows: Galen’s 2nd-century theories, based on animal dissections, inaccurately described the female anatomy, including a “two-cavity” uterus, perpetuating errors for centuries.
16th Century
Women’s Bodies? Why Bother: Renaissance anatomists like Vesalius made significant strides but focused mostly on male bodies, reinforcing the notion that female anatomy was less important.
17th Century
Female Health Conditions Overlooked: Medical texts of the era neglected key female health issues like menstrual disorders and menopause, contributing to persistent gaps in understanding.
18th Century
They’re Just “Hysterical”: The term “hysteria” was used as a blanket term to diagnose (and dismiss) PMS symptoms such as mood swings, anxiety, insomnia, and changes in appetite or sexual desire. The worst part? A hysteria diagnosis could land a misunderstood woman in a mental asylum.
19th Century
Just “women’s issues”: Persistent gender-based stereotypes led to many women’s health issues being misunderstood or ignored. For instance, women experiencing severe menopause symptoms like hot flashes were often told these were merely “ageing” issues rather than symptoms requiring medical intervention.
Early 20th Century
Medical research or men’s club? Even as medical science leaped forward, research still had a one-track mind, focusing almost exclusively on men. This left crucial aspects of female health in the shadows, making many women's issues underexplored and poorly understood
The Research Gap
Enter the ‘default’ human. He’s a 70 kilogram, white man. And, in case you weren’t already aware, the very fundamentals of what we know about human biology is based on him. There is an assumption in health research that the 70kg white man is reflective of all people, and, as such, is what much of our health and medical knowledge is based on.
As shockingly, women weren’t even allowed to participate in most medical research until 1993. For decades, this exclusion meant that women's health was largely overlooked in studies, leaving a huge gap in our understanding of how health conditions and treatments affect women differently. This longstanding bias has created significant disparities in healthcare and led to a lack of tailored treatments for women.
For years, women were kept out of clinical research, thanks to:
- Fears About Fertility: The concern that participating in studies might affect women’s ability to have children, reflecting outdated beliefs about women’s primary roles in society.
- Perceived Complexity: The notion that studying women was a hassle due to our many biological variables—because, apparently, our biological differences were considered more of a complication than a natural variation.
Even after the FDA lifted the ban on women in research in 1993, progress has been frustratingly slow. Women are still underrepresented in clinical trials, which has led to major gaps in understanding how female hormones affect:
- Medication Metabolism: Why women might react differently to the same medications.
- Pain Perception: How we experience and report pain in unique ways.
- Disease Risk: How certain diseases impact different female populations.
The Gender Pain Gap
This lack of research into women’s health has a direct link to another critical issue: the gender pain gap. The ways in which women experience and report pain have been vastly misunderstood and overlooked, simply because the models used for pain research were built around male bodies and experiences.
The gender pain gap isn’t just a minor flaw in the wider gender health narrative; it’s a profound and critical issue affecting how medical professionals handle and understand female pain. Historically, women’s pain has been shrugged off or underestimated, thanks to deep-rooted gender bias and the fact that most pain assessments were built around men’s bodies and experiences.
The Gender Pain Gap Today
We’re no longer in the Dark Ages, so why are women still having such a hard time receiving care in this day and age?
Delayed Diagnosis and Misdiagnosis
Women regularly face delayed diagnoses or misdiagnosis for conditions like endometriosis, adenomyosis, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), and fibromyalgia, all of which involve chronic pain. Too often, their symptoms are brushed aside as "psychological" or "exaggerated," leading to prolonged suffering and frustration.
Take endometriosis, for example: it takes an average of 7-10 years for women to receive a proper diagnosis, despite many reporting severe pain that impacts their daily lives. Similarly, PCOS remains underdiagnosed, with research estimating that up to 70% of cases go undetected. This delay isn’t just an inconvenience—it can result in complications like infertility, diabetes, and increased mental health struggles.
Inequitable Pain Management
A painful truth: women experiencing the same pain as men are much less likely to get prescribed the same level of pain relief. Instead, they’re pushed toward therapy or anti-anxiety meds, as if their pain is all in their head. Spoiler: it’s not.
In a recent study, men reporting the same levels of pain as women were seen as tough and stoic, while women were often labelled as emotional, dramatic, or even hysterical for describing their discomfort.
This isn’t just frustrating—it’s dangerous. It perpetuates the idea that women’s pain is “all in their heads,” leading to inadequate treatment and prolonged suffering. While men get pain relief, women are left to navigate not only their physical pain but also the emotional toll of not being taken seriously.
Worsened Health Outcomes
When pain is left untreated or mismanaged, the consequences can be severe. Chronic pain doesn’t just linger—it gets worse, affecting everything from mobility to mental health. Without proper care, women see a sharp decline in their quality of life, and the risk of anxiety, depression climbs. Over time, these untreated conditions can lead to significant long-term health issues.
But it’s not just about discomfort. There’s hard evidence that gender bias in pain management has real, dangerous consequences. Take heart disease, for example: women often face longer delays in getting to the hospital, lower emergency priority from ambulance services, and they’re more frequently sent to hospitals without the necessary intervention facilities. These disparities in care make a bad situation even worse, highlighting just how critical it is to close the gender pain gap.
The Cost of the Gender Pain Gap
- Women are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed when having a heart attack
- 1 in 3 women have had their health concerns dismissed
- While 75% of chronic pain sufferers are women, around 80% of pain study participants are men
- Women are 25% less likely to receive pain relief
- Women are more likely to receive sedatives instead of pain medication
- The average gap between initial symptoms and diagnosis of endometriosis is 7+ years
