![]() That stems from the fact that heart failure trials typically use male participants. To me, one of the most striking findings in your book is that in the UK, women are 50 percent more likely to be misdiagnosed after a heart attack, according to Leeds University researchers. And women are 50 percent of the global population! Sigal Samuel That’s partly because of the excuses we still get, which are outrageous - like the excuse that women’s bodies are too hormonal and too complicated to measure. It’s just that this way of thinking is so pervasive that we don’t even realize we’re doing it. I don’t think there’s some giant conspiracy and medical researchers all hate women and want us to die. You see that going all the way back to Aristotle - he refers to the female body as a mutilated male body - and you see it in textbooks today, where the male anatomy is presented as the anatomy. The female body is seen as the atypical body. And it comes from the fact that the male body has always been taken as the standard human being. You write that the medical system is “from root to tip, systematically discriminating against women, leaving them chronically misunderstood, mistreated and misdiagnosed.” Can you start by explaining how the system got this way? Caroline Criado Perez A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows. I spoke to Criado Perez about why the medical system treats women’s pain differently, whether we need to design drugs specifically for women, and how she dealt with the gaslighting she experienced while working on the book. That’s crucial, because a new pain medication that’s ineffective for men may work great for women, but you’d never know it if you mixed all their data together.Īll this gives rise to a powerful possibility: What if we can reduce suffering for half the population, simply by ceasing to design everything as if it’ll only be used by men?Ĭriado Perez’s book discusses how biased design shows up pretty much everywhere, but the issues she identifies in the realm of health are the most striking because they’re the most dangerous. ![]() Because most things and spaces - from pain medications to cars, and from air-conditioned offices to city streets - have been designed by men with men as the default user, they often don’t work well for women.Įven when researchers do gather data from women as well as men in their studies, they often fail to sex-disaggregate it - to separate out the male and female data they’ve collected and analyze it for differences. That data gets used to allocate research funding and make decisions about design. In a new book, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, the British journalist and feminist activist Caroline Criado Perez argues that this is part of a larger problem: the “gender data gap.” Basically, the data our society collects is typically about men’s experience, not women’s. As a spate of articles about the phenomenon has come out in the past couple of years, more people have begun talking about a “gender pain gap.” Many, many women have had this experience when they go to the doctor. This phenomenon can have lethal consequences. ![]() In medical lore, the term “Yentl syndrome” has come to describe what happens when women present to their doctors with symptoms that differ from men’s - they often get misdiagnosed, mistreated, or told the pain is all in their heads. She has to change the way she dresses, the timbre of her voice, and much more to get any respect. In the 1983 movie Yentl, the title character, played by Barbra Streisand, pretends to be a man to get the education she wants.
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