Caroline Cunningham sat in an emergency room in Georgetown, Ont., for three hours before being treated for a heart attack. This is because medical staff dismissed her, saying she was experiencing indigestion.
Cunningham is just one of the many women who have experienced the obvious gender bias in healthcare.
According to a report from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, women display unique symptoms of heart attacks, which oftentimes medical students are not trained to recognize.
According to Heart and Stroke Canada, these signs include nausea and migraines.
For men, on the other hand, it is often relatively easy to diagnose a heart attack, as medical professionals are taught to detect signs like crushing chest pain, which is how the male body responds to this illness.
This is just one of many examples of bias disproportionately benefitting men in the world of medicine.
“When I went into the hospital, I don’t think I was treated properly, and after two hours of waiting, the pain was persisting, and only at that point did they say they would monitor me,” Cunningham said. “And they didn’t have any rooms or stretchers, so I was sent back to the waiting room.”
Mackenzie Lemieux, a medical student at Washington University and advocate for women in STEM, said bias in healthcare against women starts on the practitioner’s side.
“When I think about gender bias in medicine, I tend to jump towards the perspective of the provider and how there’s bias in terms of hiring and bias in fields that are more surgically heavy,” she said. “There are some specialties that are just so heavily skewed towards male dominance, and it takes a long time to change.
“Because when you have men, they tend to hire men,” Lemieux said.
She said this bias against women is in large because of how the field of medicine was built.
“So many of the original studies in medicine that we base a lot of our drugs and how we treat people off of, were studied with men,” Lemieux said. “And that is a huge thing in my field of OBGYN, because so few studies guide us to know what to give for a woman in pregnancy.”
Statements like this highlight the obvious difference in care and treatment for women and men.
For example, a 2018 pain research and management study found that medical practitioners often view women exhibiting signs of chronic pain to be “hysterical”, while men were deemed to be “stoic”.
Similarly, another survey from 2018 published in Dove Medical Press, a peer-reviewed database of scientific journals, found most healthcare providers believed women exaggerate pain and illness to some degree.
There are certain factors that further perpetuate this narrative of women being “hysterical”.
Women are more likely to experience invisible health issues like fibromyalgia and autoimmune disorders, which providers often dismiss and say it’s all in the patient’s head, Lemieux said.
“These patients, which are majority women, are often treated poorly by the system and not fully cared for,” she said. “And they end up having very negative views of the healthcare system, which breeds distrust of medicine because you think your doctor doesn’t care about you or your pain.”
Lemieux said this complicated history of medicine looking at women as less-than goes as deep as those who identify as female having around 70 body parts named after men.
While women are slowly creeping their way into the field of medicine, which might change the type of care women receive when in need of medical attention, Lemieux said this is a long road.
She said there are factors beyond the male dominance in the workplace that restrict women, like pregnancy and having children.
In the meantime, women like Cunningham are experiencing a lack of care when they need it most, which is unacceptable.
“Every second is so important when you have a heart attack because the heart muscle starts to die. I could’ve died,” Cunningham said.