At least in medicine the gender inequality It won’t exist, right? No, it doesn’t. It’s called Gender health gap and it is the disparity in research and treatment of diseases on male and female bodies. The gap is particularly evident in the number of late diagnoses and inadequate treatments for diseases that affect female bodies.
Medical Gap Between Underrepresentation and Gender Bias
It’s a sad reality: the women I am underrepresented in clinical studies. For a long time it was believed that the male body and the female body were similar and that diseases presented themselves in the same way, in terms of symptoms and treatments. When difficulties arose in treatments on female bodies compared to the standard (which is the male body) it was believed that it was the hormonal fluctuations that to confuse the results.
The same problem arose for clinical trials: female hormones prevented the data from being analyzed in a clean. With this bias, for a long time, until the end of the last century, data on diseases, even chronic ones, were taken only from male bodies. Many studies were conducted on these and the results were generalized also for women, without considering the biological and physiological differences of the latter.
Inevitably this type of partial data collection has led to late diagnosissymptoms ignored or worse still misinterpreted. Perhaps one of the most serious examples is the diagnosis of heart attack. It is now well known that women have a three times higher risk of dying from a heart attack because the symptoms are confused with anxiety disorders, while a man who enters the hospital with chest pain is immediately admitted for possible heart attack.
These are real gaps in research and in several cases also investment gaps. In fact, for those pathologies that mostly affect female bodies, significantly less investment is made. Among the least studied pathologies we findmigraineanorexia, endometriosis and myalgic encephalomyelitis. In most cases, when faced with similar pathologies, the answer was that they were anxiety disorders, stress, low pain tolerance and other trivializations that prevented science from responding to pathologies that had as their most common symptom a general pain and difficult to identify.
The Endometriosis Case: Time and Money Wasted
One case in particular has caused much discussion, even recently, given the various proposals that have been made in Italy regarding the recognition of the pathology. This is the case ofendometriosisa pathology that does not only affect female bodies, but to a large extent it does and for this reason it is often underestimated. Even in 2024 the diagnostic delay for endometriosis varies from 8 months to 10 years and more than 10 appointments with specialized, but not up-to-date, doctors are needed to recognize the signs of a serious pathology.
We are not talking about a pathology with a low impact on the population: in the latest report on the diagnosis of endometriosis it was possible to find a wide diffusion, so much so that the pathology affects 1.5 million women. If we calculate the number of women and the time taken for diagnosis, we are talking about 12 million years wasted in search of an answer.
How much do diagnostic delays and lack of treatment cost us?
And it could be too Alone a women’s problem, if it were not for the fact that those who suffer from chronic pathologies such as endometriosis, migraine, and other syndromes such aspolycystic ovary negatively impacts a country’s economy.
Just think about the fact that those who suffer from endometriosis lose (better to say that “he needs to rest for”) about 10.8 hours of work per weekgreatly reducing the productivity of a company. Those who suffer from endometriosis are often absent from work and therefore fear losing it. The fault certainly does not lie with a suffering body, but with the lack of an early and correct diagnosis and research on the best treatment.
Before the diagnosis I am almost 1 million women forced to leave work for symptoms treated incorrectly. The numbers are high, but above all impressive because we know well how a greater presence of women in the world of work and places with female leadership can have positive effects not only generationally, but also economically, positively impacting the Gross Domestic Product.
Global Gender Gap 2024: Too Many Biases About Women’s Bodies
The report on the Gender gap 2024 it focuses on women, but when we talk about “health” we should be talking about “bodies assigned female at birth”. In fact, biology does not change and trans men should also be included in these statistics, suffering a double condition of health gap, but they do not.
The data that emerge are therefore partial or at least some items are missing. The World Economic Forum pushes a lot on the theme of maternity, for example, but we know well that there are many women who choose to join the Childfree movement and who, in any case, need medical care in other areas.
We therefore report the analyses that emerged from the report, while being careful about the partiality of the data collected. We know in fact that women generally have a longer life expectancy compared to men, but that the quality of life lived “in good health” is often less due to undiagnosed or delayed treatment of illnesses.
The report then touches on the topic of maternal mortalityhighlighting how women still face significantly higher risks during pregnancy than their partners and that the difficulty in coping with childbirth is often due to the lack of resources dedicated to reproductive health.
Still on the subject of reproduction, the report explains how there are evident cultural and legal limitations with respect to the services of reproductive health that negatively affect a woman’s overall health.
The theme not explicitly stated is that of access to theVoluntary termination of pregnancywhich in some countries has seen huge steps backwards such as in the United States, in Poland and also in Italy where the risk of making a choice – such as that of carrying a pregnancy to term – is increasingly influenced by “pro-life” groups within counseling centers and hospital facilities.
To close the reproduction cycle there is then the data on thebirth assistancefor which it is necessary to have qualified healthcare personnel and in this case the data varies greatly from country to country.
The data collection ends with violence against women and the impact it has on their physical and mental health, thus contributing to long-term inequalities in the absence of prevention, care and well-being policies in many countries. The West, in this data, does not present itself improveas he often wants us to believe.
The Economic Impact of Health Disparity
Let’s get back to the topic ofeconomic impact, because it has been calculated how much the gender gap in the medical field costs us. Considering only how much it costs us, and not how much it costs us at a social level, according to the report of the Word economic forum he was born in McKinsey Health Institutethe global economy will lose trillion dollars a year by 2040 if the gender health gap is not filled.
The study goes into detail about some countries, for example in the United Kingdom the economic impact is 18 billion per year. At a global level it says:
Addressing the gap could generate an impact equivalent to 137 million women entering full-time positions by 2040. This could potentially lifting women out of poverty and enable more women to provide for themselves and their families. Addressing the causes of this gap (i.e. less effective treatments for womenthe worse delivery of care and lack of data) would require substantial investments but would also reflect new market opportunities.
To address this problem we need to invest in researchthere are not many other possible endings. Just think that in Canada and the United Kingdom only 5.9% of the funds granted between 2009 and 2020 concerned specific studies on women or their health. In general, the women’s health is underfunded Existing funding everywhere and often ignores the fact that some pathologies can manifest themselves differently in female bodies than in male ones.
But you know, money goes where men go.. An example is that the erectile dysfunction has been the subject of five times more research than premenstrual syndrome, but while the former affects Alone The 19% of mensuffers from premenstrual syndrome 90% of women.
In short, to reduce the economic and social impact of the gender gap in healthcare it would be enough to start investing equally in research for male and female pathologies. Eliminating the gap would also allow the reduction of the pay gap between men and women. Consequently, the state coffers would also benefit: fewer working days lost, more production, lower costs for public health.
