Giving Compass' Take:

• Christine Ekechi explains that gender inequality in healthcare is leaving women without adequate care, causing unnecessary suffering and death. 

• How can funders support research, trainings, and other projects to advance women's healthcare? 

• Learn about women's connections to the healthcare delivery system. 

The field of medicine quite often finds itself slow to reflect the progressive changes in wider society. In particular, it can be slow to recognize the negative impact of an historically patriarchal system, which continues to have an unconscious, and at times, conscious, negative bias against women within the health system.

A recent study by the British Heart Foundation and researchers from the University of Leeds found that women were three times more likely to die from a heart attack within the first year of the study compared to the men in the same study. Researches discovered that women were not receiving the same recommended treatment as men, in part because of the incorrect assessment of the severity of their symptoms.

Time and time again, research shows that women regularly suffer from chronic pain for far longer, and rather patronizingly, are more likely to be incorrectly treated with antidepressants and sedatives rather than with adequate pain relief medication. Health professionals - irrespective of gender - frequently view women who complain of pain as anxious or ‘emotional’, often missing more sinister disease and delaying diagnosis.

Whilst we continue to highlight the unfair gender pay gap and fight against sexual harassment, we must not forget the negative disparities in healthcare. As health professionals, it would do us well to consider more what the person is saying rather than who is saying it.

Read the full article about gender inequality in healthcare by Christine Ekechi at UK Huffpost.