Women’s healthcare still nowhere near equality: Prejudice, taboos and sexism are still pervasive in medicine, with rippling effects in all elements of a girl’s life.
But there was an omnipresent note of optimism in WIRED Health last week at a panel on the longer term of girls’s health. Taboos are being broken – especially in relation to topics like menstruation, menopause and ladies’s bodies. “There’s a dramatic shift happening at once,” says Jennifer Garrison, co-founder and director of the Global Consortium for Reproductive Longevity and Equality on the Buck Institute in California.
The change starts with higher education about women’s health, says Geeta Nargund, founder and medical director of Create Fertility, a UK-based IVF service. The situation is beginning to improve: within the UK from 2024, women’s health education can be compulsory for medical students.
One obvious need is to review the best way medicine thinks and talks about menopause – and the way it’s treated. “Going through menopause is probably the most dramatic things that may occur to a healthy woman’s body,” says Garrison. Still, we see menopause as a single snapshot in a girl’s life, not a medical shift that takes place over several years and has multiple health effects.
And the realities of the feminine body shouldn’t interfere with the trajectory of her profession, because it does today. “When women’s health is so neglected, it ultimately results in a gender imbalance at the highest of the company world,” says Kate Ryder, CEO of Maven Clinic, the world’s largest virtual clinic for girls’s and family health. This is where her company matches in: Maven Clinic helps corporations retain talent by improving health outcomes and reducing the associated fee of maternity and fertility for female employees.
Despite signs of progress, there remains to be loads of work to be done. “We need to start out fascinated with women’s bodies as an entire, relatively than simply treating one organ system at a time,” says Garrison. But getting there would require more funds and a focus. “There’s just a scarcity of knowledge,” says Garrison. “So we do not understand essentially the most fundamental things about what is going on on with women’s health.”
