Written By Sasha Lootvoet

Edited By Lauren Bullock

“By all that I hold highest, I promise my patients competence, integrity, candor, personal commitment to their best interest, compassion, and absolute discretion, and confidentiality within the law.” 

We like to believe in the holiness of this oath. We want to trust that it never fails to bind those who pronounce it to our genuine interest and that it miraculously exempts them from all rampant biases in society. But doctors are just the next person. They too are vessels of the norms and values created in our socially-biased hierarchy. They do see gender, sex, race, and it is often a significant influence of the care the patient will receive. In matters of life and death especially, these gender biases have to be uncovered and remedied, because it is not viable for women to be reluctant to seek treatment for their illnesses, as more than half of them consider themselves to have been treated differently by their doctors because of their perceived gender. Let us now embark on a journey of what it is like to be mistrusted in your own experience of pain and unable to receive the medical care you should be due. Entrenched sexist beliefs and gender biases of the medical field stain every step of this process you will walk through. Now, step into the shoes of a socially perceived woman for the time of this experiment. 

Wait for your turn 

You enter the Emergency Department of your local hospital, worried about the acute abdominal pain you are experiencing but confident that you will soon be taken care of. You take a seat in the crowded waiting room, knowing that it might take a while to get to you. As time passes, you look around, and notice two people sitting not far from each other, strangers to one another, but both struggling from visibly similar and crushing chest pains. One presents as a man, the other as a woman. A doctor comes in to admit the man into the ER, and eleven minutes later you witness the same exact protocol for the woman who presented the same symptoms. What you are unaware of is that these eleven minutes represent the average additional time women presenting chest pains have to wait compared to their male counterparts—eleven minutes that, when one is at risk of having a heart attack, mean either life or death. 

Your pain does not matter 

It is finally your turn to be observed. As you now struggle to walk, you are led to a bed in the Emergency Room, and you see another patient, a man, lying in the one on your right. By now, the pain is so extreme that speaking becomes an effort, and you ask the doctor if they could give you something to relieve the pain. You get no answer. You ask again louder but they still do not look up from their chart. Frustrated and panicked, you ask a third time, your voice shaking from the waves of pain running through your body. Finally, the doctor raises his head with a look betraying a hint of annoyance and orders the nurse to give you sedatives. Not painkillers, but sedatives. What you fortunately do not notice is that simultaneously, the male patient next to you received a dose of opioids as soon as he complained that his headache had become unbearable. 

It is all in your head 

At the doctor’s request, you start describing your symptoms and your level of pain. Their reaction, however, leaves you confused. Have you been stressed lately? You answer that no, you have not been more stressed than usual. As the questions keep on coming, you suddenly realize they all come back to your psychological state, and thirty minutes later, no tests of any kind have been run to understand the source of your pain. Despite your protestations, you are released from the hospital with a prescription for anti-anxiolytic developed for a male anatomy and physiology, and tested solely on men during clinical trials—anti-anxiolytic your metabolism cannot process quickly enough to prevent it from putting you at risk of falling asleep at the wheel. Fortunately, you are convinced your pain is not the result of anxiety and will keep looking for a specialist who recognises your symptoms. It will take five visits to five different practitioners before you find the one who accurately diagnoses you. 

The medical reality today is that women’s pain is not acknowledged as such. It is dismissed, under the common opinion that women tend to exaggerate their pain and do not understand their own bodies. They are taught not to trust their instincts, even when in most cases these same instincts—this confidence that something was truly and definitely wrong in their bodies and that led them to ask again and again for tests and investigation—are the reason they are still alive. A rampant brain tumour dismissed as anxiety, an “exaggerated” pain that in fact betrayed a nurse’s mistake in peridural dosing—instances of sexism around women’s experience of pain are endless. Not only does this disregard lead to women having to bear their pain without the appropriate and available pain medication that men don’t even have to ask for, but it often goes hand in hand with a lack of investigation from the doctors. 

This “trust gap” coexists with a “knowledge gap.” Scientifically, male bodies are different than females. They have different hormonal cycles, genetics, etc., and while this may appear like an obvious truth, the extent of these differences is not yet understood nor investigated enough. It was always much more convenient to extend the already omnipresent male standard in society to the medical field. After the Second World War, a concern grew about the so-called protection of women of child-bearing age from medical experiment, which led to their exclusion from all medication clinical trials that were coincidentally a lot easier to perform solely on men. Their bodies are more homogeneous and do not present the constantly fluctuating cycle of hormones female bodies do. Fingers were pointed in the 1970s on this arbitrary exclusion, and the Women’s Health Movement (WHM) emerged to voice these growing concerns. Originally grounded in the second wave of feminism, the WHM was and is still committed to increasing public awareness of the problems in the delivery of health care to women and triggering changes in that health care. Its pressure led the National Institutes of Health to undertake multiple initiatives ; a policy for the inclusion of women in clinical research was for instance adopted in 1986. Despite this progress, women are still largely excluded from certain areas. They represent only 41% of cancer clinical trial participants although they make up 51% of cancer patients, and even more strikingly they comprise 42% of participants for psychiatric disorders drugs while they constitute 60 percent of the patient population. 

As a result, symptoms that doctors cannot explain with their male-modeled diagnosis are not taken seriously and the woman’s pain is labeled as “psychogenic” or as “medically unexplained symptoms,” both terms some accurately describe as the old “hysteria” phenomenon rebranded for modern medicine. Finally, the cycle is completed with medications developed to fit a male anatomical system, tested on male rats and later on male humans. 

Until the medical field is ready to truly face its entrenched biases and take actions to dismantle them, as long as women are afraid of seeking health care, doctors cannot promise competence, integrity, candor, personal commitment to all their patients without perjuring themselves. 

References : 

Dusenbery, M. (2019). Doing harm : the truth about how bad medicine and lazy science leave women dismissed, misdiagnosed, and sick (First HarperCollins paperback). HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers. 

Hossain, A. (2021). The pain gap : how sexism in healthcare kills women (First Tiller Press hardcover). Tiller Press. February 29, 2024,

Chen, E.H., Shofer, F.S., Dean, A.J., Hollander, J.E., Baxt, W.G., Robey, J.L., Sease, K.L. and Mills, A.M. (2008), Gender Disparity in Analgesic Treatment of Emergency Department Patients with Acute Abdominal Pain. Academic Emergency Medicine, 15: 414-418. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1553-2712.2008.00100.x 

Geary, M. S. (1995). An analysis of the women’s health movement and its impact on the delivery of health care within the united states. The Nurse Practitioner, 20(11 Pt 1), 27–8 

Bever, L. (2022, December 13). Women’s pain often is dismissed by doctors. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/interactive/2022/women-pain-gender-bias-doctors/# 

Rapaport, L. (2022, May 4). Women with chest pain wait longer for emergency care than men. EverydayHealth.com. https://www.everydayhealth.com/womens-health/women-with-chest-pain-wait-longer-for-emergency-care-than-men/ 

Feel discriminated against at the doctor’s office? You’re not alone. (2019, May 13). TODAY.com. https://www.today.com/health/today-survey-finds-gender-discrimination-doctor-s-office-serious-issue-t153641 

More data needed. (2022, June 29). Harvard Medical School. https://hms.harvard.edu/news/more-data-needed#:~:text=After%20examining%201%2C433%20trials%20with,of%20trial% 20participants%20were%20female.