How much does being a woman really affect your experience with healthcare?

When we look at world’s history, it is unfortunately common to look at absurd committed against women. By contrast, the modern society seems way more welcoming, safe and evolved around the female well-being. However, even though some advances have been made, they are not uniform to all groups we still face the same stigmas, only covered in mascara. Although healthcare is a fundamental human right, it’s still not guaranteed for all – and inequality persists in one of the most critical areas of everyday life. Therefore, it is important to address the systematic gender bias in medicine, understanding it´s several implications that had been compromising the well-being of women for centuries and still needs to be addressed and confronted.

The Pain Bias and Difference in Diagnose

A woman arrives at the emergency room complaining of severe chest pain. Instead of being rushed into cardiac evaluation, she is told it may be anxiety. Hours later, she is diagnosed with a heart attack, and those hours of dismissal played a crucial role in her condition. While this scenario may seem like an exception, it reflects a broader and deeply rooted pattern in modern healthcare: women’s pain is consistently taken less seriously.
The consequences of this initial dismissal extend far beyond a single clinical encounter. When women’s symptoms are not taken seriously from the outset, the entire diagnostic process is delayed, often by months or even years. Conditions that require early intervention may go undetected, while others are repeatedly misattributed to stress, anxiety, or hormonal fluctuations. This pattern is particularly evident in illnesses such as autoimmune diseases and cardiovascular conditions, where women frequently present symptoms that diverge from male-centered diagnostic models. As a result, many patients are forced to navigate multiple consultations before receiving accurate diagnoses, a process that not only prolongs physical suffering but also erodes trust in medical institutions and in some cases, preventable medical complications.

This disparity becomes even more evident in the realm of pain management. Studies discussed by institutions such as Cleveland Clinic indicate that women are less likely than men to receive adequate analgesic treatment for comparable levels of pain. Instead of being prescribed painkillers, they are more frequently given sedatives or advised managing symptoms through stress reduction. This distinction is not trivial: while analgesics target the physiological source of pain, sedatives implicitly frame the experience as psychological, reinforcing the perception that the problem lies not in the body, but in the patient’s emotional response.

Over time, this pattern produces compounding effects. When pain is consistently undertreated, conditions may worsen; recovery times may lengthen, and the overall burden of illness increases. Moreover, repeated experiences of dismissal can lead patients to internalize doubt about their own symptoms, delaying future attempts to seek care. In this way, inequality in pain management is not only a matter of immediate discomfort, but a factor that shapes long-term health outcomes and healthcare engagement.

Ultimately, these disparities point to a deeper issue within clinical practice: women are heard less, believed less. The minimization of their pain, the redirection of their symptoms toward psychological explanations, and the reluctance to provide adequate treatment all reflect a broader deficit of empathy in how their experiences are perceived. What emerges is not a series of isolated oversights, but a consistent pattern in which women’s suffering is filtered through skepticism rather than urgency transforming what should be a space of care into one where their voices must first struggle to be recognized as credible.

A problem that also impacts research: How gender bias affects research funding of certain conditions

Organizations such as the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization have acknowledged persistent disparities in research representation, emphasizing that the underrepresentation of women in scientific studies continues to affect health outcomes on a global scale. In this context, the uncertainty that physicians may face when treating female patients is structurally produced.
  By matters of comparison, Diabetes affects up to 10% of the world population, and similarly, endometriosis affects 10%-15% of all women in reproductive age. Both chronic severe conditions that imply several comprise the lives of those who suffer from it. However, Diabetes research receives over $1 billion annually in federal funding from the NIH in the U.S. alone, endometriosis, by contrast, receives approximately $28–$30 million annually in 2024–2025. This represents roughly $4.30 per patient per year, which is vastly lower than funding for diseases with similar prevalence.
Ultimately, current knowledge and research merely underlines how underfunding is reflecting a broader societal attitude towards women’s health issues and menstrual disorders, maintaining a cycle of neglect and marginalisation
The implications of this funding gap are profound. Limited financial investment translates into fewer large-scale studies, reduced innovation in treatment development, and a lack of standardized diagnostic tools. Consequently, conditions like endometriosis are not only under-researched but also under-recognized in clinical practice. Thus, the issue is not merely one of insufficient knowledge, but of a self-perpetuating system in which lack of research leads to clinical uncertainty, and clinical uncertainty, in turn, legitimizes the dismissal of women’s experiences.

“The Default Male”

One of the most harmful forms of gender bias in healthcare is the persistence of the “default male” model in pharmaceultical research. For decades, biomedical research has relied primarily on male cells, male animals, and male participants in clinical trials, then generalized those findings to women. This created a system in which male biology is treated as universal, while female biology is considered secondary.

The consequences are severe. Women are 50–75% more likely than men to experience adverse drug reactions, even at standard doses. This is not because women are inherently more vulnerable, but because medications are often developed and tested according to male-centered assumptions. Researchers have identified dose-related gender gaps in more than 86 FDA-approved drugs, showing that standard dosing frequently ignores sex-based physiological differences.

At the core of this problem is the outdated belief that women are simply “smaller versions” of men. Modern research disproves this: biological differences between sexes extend far beyond body size, affecting metabolism, immune responses, and cardiovascular function, all of which shape how drugs work in the body.

Yet even today, many studies include women only superficially, without analyzing sex-specific outcomes. This reinforces the default male framework and leaves critical differences hidden. Ultimately, the issue is systemic: healthcare continues to be built on male standards, producing treatments that are less safe, less effective, and less equitable for women.

Conclusion

From the dismissal of pain as emotional rather than physical, to delayed diagnoses, to chronic underfunding of female-centered conditions, gender continues to shape not only how women are treated in medical spaces, but also how medicine itself is designed. These disparities are not isolated incidents or unfortunate oversights—they are the product of structural assumptions that have positioned male biology as the norm and female biology as a deviation.

What emerges is a healthcare system in which women are expected to adapt to standards that were not built around them. Their symptoms are more likely to be questioned, their conditions less likely to be prioritized, and their treatments less likely to be tailored to their physiology. The result is not simply inequality in access, but inequality in knowledge, trust, and outcomes.

True progress in healthcare requires more than awareness. It demands systemic change: equitable research funding, sex-specific analysis in clinical studies, and a medical culture willing to confront its own biases. Until then, being a woman will continue to affect healthcare experiences in ways that are measurable, preventable, and deeply consequential. And a system that fails half the population cannot claim to be truly effective, nor truly just.

Kirk, U. B., Bank-Mikkelsen, A. S., Rytter, D., Hartwell, D., Marschall, H., Nyegaard, M., Seyer-Hansen, M., & Hansen, K. E. (2024). Understanding endometriosis underfunding and its detrimental impact on awareness and research. Npj Women’s Health, 2(1), 45. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44294-024-00048-6
Andrews, J., Ducharme, S., Chertkow, H., et al. (2025). Sex differences in response to Alzheimer’s treatment.

Becker, J. B., & Ahmed, M. (2025). Sex differences in biological systems and disease.

Heidari, S., Babor, T. F., De Castro, P., et al. (2016). Sex and Gender Equity in Research (SAGER) guidelines.

Nature Portfolio. (2022). Raising the bar on sex and gender reporting in research.

Rechlin, R. K., Splinter, J. E., Hodges, T. E., et al. (2022). Sex inclusion and analysis in biomedical research.

University of New South Wales. (2022). Women are 50–75% more likely to have adverse drug reactions. https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2022/12/women-are-50_75–more-likely-to-have-adverse-drug-reactions–a-n

The Conversation. (2025). How male anatomy became the default in medicine—and why that’s a problem. https://theconversation.com/how-male-anatomy-became-the-default-in-medicine-and-why-thats-a-problem-255648

bioRxiv. (2026). Sex inclusion and reporting practices in Nature 2025 publications. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.03.709344v1.full