Now, if weight is being used here as a proxy for sex or sex, larger women would require a higher dose. The smaller the man, the lower the dose. So why not use body weight as a measure of the dose a person should receive? That would be a more effective way to decide. However, we collect data along certain policies and not others, so guidelines can be created along certain policies and not along others. there is no.
Another example is that when a woman complains of pain, her pain may not be fully understood. Statistically, women are more likely than men to go to the doctor when they experience pain. But then the common myths and assumptions that “it's not that serious” start to emerge. “She's hysterical.”
So there's a lot to break down here. What we don't really care about is taking it apart. Just by seeing a difference, we attribute it to something else without knowing what the root cause is.
So how can we better distinguish between sex differences and sexism to reduce health disparities between men and women?
For me, it's about taking medicine to the next level of research, which is the level of social determinants of health. Many of the things that kill most of us have a large social or environmental component. Food, stress, social treatment, etc.
Research into the effects of sexism and racism on health, as well as the effects of other social factors, is relatively recent. The job you do and your marital status can also affect your health.
There are all these little pieces that need research and it's an ongoing project. We don't just study the effects of being married and being a stay-at-home mom on health once. This is because these social factors are constantly changing.
Sex and gender are aspects of this social narrative. However, it is important to understand where to properly call it. Sometimes it has to do with gender, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes sex is important, sometimes it's not.
What is stopping things from getting better?
Research funding agencies are much more interested in looking inside our bodies to explain why things are the way they are. It is much more difficult to study the outside world because social conditions are constantly changing. There can be significant differences within and between households. Collecting data on social conditions is much more difficult.
But we're at the point where we can learn a lot from cell phones that track people's activities. Data is being collected about what people eat, how they move, and how active they are. Eventually, you will be able to build a personalized portrait of people, and stop generalizing and assuming people in a group are typical of that group, and start understanding them as complex individuals. It will be.
Who is driving the understanding and closing of health disparities between men and women?
Sarah Richardson and her team at Harvard University, where she runs the GenderSci Lab, have done some amazing research into understanding the causes of health disparities between men and women. They force medical researchers to think very carefully about the context of the symptoms they are investigating.
The team has done a great job during the pandemic. Initially, there were some very wild claims being made about gender differences due to the virus. For example, women, on average, have stronger immune systems and are therefore more protected. Looking at the data, we found that this is not really the case. They help dispel this very pseudoscientific assumption that the virus is affecting all populations uniformly, and they look at demographic patterns as factors in COVID-19, what kind of work people do, It helped end the neglect of who was working on the front lines.
As Richardson says, this work on sex contextualism is a very compelling model for how we think about sex and gender in research.
Hear Angela Saini speak at WIRED Health's 10th anniversary event on March 19th at King's Place, London. Get your tickets at health.wired.com.
