This is the web version of Americanas, EL PAÍS América's newsletter covering news and ideas from a gender perspective. If you would like To, you can do so using this link.
A report published earlier this year in América Futura showed that science remains a hostile world for women. Sexist inequality not only affects them in this professional field, but also worsens their access to care for many illnesses. A study in The Lancet last September concluded that the deaths of at least 1.5 million women could be avoided through primary prevention strategies or early detection of cancer. Mexican oncologist María Teresa Bourlon, one of the co-authors of the study, revealed in an interview with this medium how these data relate to patriarchy.
In some Latin American countries, the reality is even more worrying, particularly among indigenous and African American women, whose health tends to be the worst due to poor or no care and who have a shorter life expectancy. This reflects the extent to which women continue to face inequality in fundamental rights compared to men.
I still remember very well the moment when I realized to what extent the sexist perspective also dominates the field of health and science. It was the day I interviewed Carme Valls, an endocrinologist who advocated for the inclusion of women in clinical trials in Spain more than two decades ago; Among many other achievements, she was also a pioneer in examining differences in mortality between genders in research. After speaking with her, I learned, among many other aspects of health inequality, that until the mid-1990s there were no research studies that considered women in cardiovascular medicine: they were directly excluded from the studies. Even despite gender differences at biochemical, genetic, cellular and physiological levels, many works still show little or no involvement of female populations in biomedical research.
Author of several books on the subject, Valls has dedicated her career to making visible how medicine and research have prioritized men's bodies over women's, and the need to apply differential biology by gender as one of the major challenges justify in the health sector, including the need for consistent positive action.
Among so many health care professionals, many cardiology mortality and treatment studies are still predominantly designed with men. This prioritization of the male population by the research and clinical care system results in many women losing their lives because they were not taken into account when planning experimental studies or in consultations. This is according to another 2021 report from the Lancet magazine, a publication that documents that the female population remains under-screened, under-diagnosed and under-treated when it comes to cardiovascular disease.
In Mexico, another similar problem is exemplified by HIV and the public policies to combat its occurrence and impact on lives, which exclude women from the prevention and treatment of infections, even though discrimination and sexist violence make them more vulnerable to contracting HIV.
As many published works show, involving researchers in the design of clinical trials not only leads to a more comprehensive and better study of the health problems that affect us, but also improves scientific results. After all, we make up more than half of the world's population… Yet women continue to be underrepresented in research-related fields, accounting for just over 30% of authorships worldwide.
In Latin America, where few guidelines have been developed to include women in biomedical research, renowned scientists such as Brenda Crabtree, a leading HIV expert, denounce that this percentage is even more critical. An urgent reality that must be addressed through government policy. Parity in research teams means that gender can be better taken into account as a differentiating factor, for example to learn how cancer affects men and women differently or what limit doses of medication should be taken depending on the body being treated.
The differences in gender-specific research also extend to some preclinical studies using animal models. Because female rats are more unstable, laboratories prefer to work with samples from male rats. A belief in animal testing that Rebecca Shansky, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University in Boston, debunked in a 2019 study published in the journal Science. After conducting several experiments with rodents in the field of neuroscience, the data collected showed how the females fared no longer vary. In some cases, results were most different in men due to hierarchy and dominance patterns between samples with different testosterone levels.
A telling fact about the patriarchal system in medicine is that two of its research areas, where most studies are missing, concern women's sexual and reproductive health. There are still many taboos and myths when it comes to menstruation or menopause. It's still a shame to talk about our pleasure. In this 2019 interview, Helen O'Connell, the first Australian woman to specialize in urology, highlighted that, unlike the male genitalia, the clitoris remains largely missing from research. After reading the awards of the scientist who for the first time described the complete anatomy of this organ so invisible and discarded – according to Unicef, more than 4 million girls are at risk of becoming victims of genital cutting every year – the thought occurred to me do a Google search. In the same year that the Australian made her big discovery, 1998, Viagra came onto the market. In the same year that the detailed map of female desire was revealed, there was already a drug to relieve sexual dysfunction in men. An ironic coincidence that, among so many examples, shows how medicine puts the male body in the foreground and treats the female body as similar despite the great differences.
As we advance the path to equality with much effort and persistence, the field of medicine and research once again illustrates an assumption of feminism: when it comes to problems and needs that affect women, we are the ones who pay attention to them, who care and are committed to changing the social injustices that affect us.
As in the health sector, there are too many examples that confirm this premise: in the end, women only and always save themselves through other women.
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