The Gender Health Gap: How the Female Body Has Been Left Behind by Modern Medicine
Throughout history, the female body has been a lot of things: sacred, scandalous, celebrated, commodified, gilded, gold-medaled, empowered, loved, and so much more.
What it hasn’t been is properly studied.
Just 28 years ago today, on June 10, 1993, Congress passed the NIH Revitalization Act.
It directed the NIH to establish guidelines for the inclusion of women and people of color in clinical research. Previously, “women with childbearing potential” had been actively excluded from the early phases of most clinical trials. Even female mice were almost entirely excluded from research due to their hormonal cycle.
That means we’re way behind when it comes to properly accounting for the female body in modern medicine. To put it another way:
“We literally know less about every aspect of female biology compared to male biology.” — NIH Associate Director Dr. Janine Austin Clayton
In 2021, almost 30 years later, this gender health gap persists globally. Across 770 diseases, from diabetes to cancer, women are diagnosed 4 years later than men, on average.
But the gender health gap isn’t just systemic — it’s personal. It’s tempting to get caught up in the staggering statistics or the billions of dollars in costs to the system — but the real cost is to the individual lives of women that are suffering underdiagnosed, dismissed, and ignored.
We’re three of those women. And our chronic problems feel even more dismissed and stigmatized because they’re related to that old taboo: vaginal health.
But we’re far from alone.
In fact, vaginal infections (like yeast infections, bacterial vaginosis, and urinary tract infections) are some of the most common infections in women and people with vaginas.
They greatly affect our quality of life through debilitating symptoms, in addition to deep shame and embarrassment in our personal and sex lives. One study showed that rates of depression and anxiety in women with yeast infections were 2.5x higher than the general population. Others with recurrent bacterial vaginosis reported regularly avoiding sexual activity “as they were too embarrassed and self-conscious of their symptoms.” — read, vaginal smell.
To make matters worse, women are constantly bombarded with advertising and products that insist our vaginas have to smell like flowers or aloe instead of, well, a body part. That means most of us don’t even realize how common these issues are — because the stigma around vaginal health prevents us from reaching out to one another.
We deserve better.
But in order to have better long-term solutions, we need better research. And given that women were not actively included in research until 1993, we should be heavily investing in R&D, femtech, and care infrastructures to help us catch up.
Unsurprisingly, this isn’t the case.
Only 4% of healthcare R&D spend goes towards women’s health in the United States. Femtech received just 3.3% of digital health funding in 2019. That’s simply not enough to close a gender health gap that has been widening for decades.
As for the three of us:
We’ve decided we can no longer sit on the sidelines, so we’re building something new, focused on creating the research and datasets we so desperately need at the pace at which we need it.
And we’re not doing it alone. We’re joined by forward-thinking doctors, scientists, and doers with decades of experience. And we’re bringing together a community of folks — both people with vaginas and their providers — who want to build this future with us.
28 years ago today, Congress fixed an important oversight in the NIH health policy. But there’s still so much work to be done. Let’s honor what’s been started by rebuilding a healthcare system that’s inclusive of all of us, with emphatic agreement that it’s long past time to take the guesswork out of women’s health for good.
