Often throughout history, women’s pain has either been dismissed, found to have an unknown cause, or labeled by the medical system as hysteria or mental illness. This is in part due to cultural taboos that surround talking about women’s bodies and in part due to our health care system’s historical bias against women. Historically, male bodies have been considered the default in medical research, and research findings, although conducted with male bodies, have often been assumed to also apply to women.
But according to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), biological sex plays a role in physiological, metabolic, hormonal and cellular differences that “influence how diseases present and the effectiveness of pharmaceuticals and medical devices” in women and men. Yet, it wasn’t until 1993 that the U.S. Congress passed a law requiring women to be included in medical research; before that, women of reproductive age had been excluded from phase I and early phase II drug research by law since 1977, as a reaction to the morning sickness drug thalidomide that caused severe birth defects and death in babies in Europe and Australia during the 1950s and 1960s. Before that, women had been poorly represented in medical research.
Despite the progress made throughout the past 30 years, as recently as 2019, a Harvard Medical School study found women were still “substantially underrepresented in clinical trials for leading diseases.” And according to the AAMC, this underrepresentation is even more substantial for women of color.
All of these historical systemic issues have made it difficult for women to be taken seriously, to be diagnosed quickly and to get better through health care. Because when we share what we know, we realize many women have health struggles, we help each other advocate for ourselves and we connect with resources that can help us heal.
