Invisible Women, by Caroline Criado Perez. Chapters 10 & 11 (https://web.s.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=68078bd0-62d0-474a-9f19-ce810b963815%40redis&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=2030243&db=nlebk)
Invisible Women, by Caroline Criado Perez. Chapters 10 & 11 (https://web.s.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=68078bd0-62d0-474a-9f19-ce810b963815%40redis&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=2030243&db=nlebk)
In Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women, the author discusses how the biomedical assumption of male physiology when treating patients results in worse health outcomes for women. In Chapters 10 and 11, it is discussed how the Western philosophical tradition of understanding men as the standard human physiology has resulted in this understanding being applied to modern biomedicine and the treatment of women. Due to this lack of care for the issue of sex, physicians practicing research do not care to include women in clinical trials or differentiate between men and women in clinical trials, negatively affecting both the curricula for future medical students and the drugs being tested.
This can serve as a lesson for computer scientists. While the underlying mathematics and computer science behind computer engineering is not sexed, the society in which engineering projects are incepted and deployed is sexed. Like in the case discussed by Perez, the difference between sexes are physiological, based in scientific research. In other cases, the difference may not be physiological but socioeconomic, where the disparate treatment of women can result in them interacting with society differently. Regardless, as computer scientists, it is important to recognize how algorithms may interface in society in a way that results in disparate impacts between the sexes. For some computer scientists, it may not be obvious how the interaction between certain groups, society, and algorithms may take place, but for others, this interaction can determine how they live their life. Of course, part of this recognition can come from more diversity in computing, but this recognition can also come from a greater awareness of how the assumptions of computer scientists affect the world.
This reading presented easily one of the most puzzling phenomena we have covered thus far in this class, and my reaction has much to do with the fact that men and women have been treated differently throughout history, so the idea that research often treats them as the same seems counterintuitive. But then again, from a different angle, it may be expected: the simple nature of menstrual cycles is enough to push a narrative of inconvenience onto women, which is reflected in the scathing commentary of this article. Many of the studies that are mentioned cite some level of avoidance to the enhanced variability of women’s bodies, casting it as some sort of barrier to entry for women’s inclusion as subjects of research. This argument is not new; comparable statements abound when we think about political positions, or just working in general—think about the trope of women being unfit to make difficult decisions because of menstruation. What makes this argument even more confusing is that it would seem to suggest that it makes sense to sex-aggregate our data (Not that the argument itself is correct, but that its implication begs some question of generalizing the human body). Somehow, though, our medicine continues to generalize its effects and findings, and to a far greater extent than I previously realized. I think about my experience taking accurate, and how relatively painless the process of getting approved to take it was, vs the monthly pregnancy tests and bloodwork that women must do to access it. I wonder if the safeguards that exist for that drug came about as an intentional decision to study both the effects on men and women, or if it was prescribed to women without thinking until there was an uptick in severe birth defects.
(accutane, not accurate)
The two chapters illustrates how male-biased research practices have severely jeopardized women’s health. As Criado Perez argues, the exclusion of female participants in clinical trials and medical studies has created dangerous gaps in knowledge that cost women’s lives. The tendency to treat male physiology as the default has normalized flaws like inaccurate drug dosages and ignorance of how diseases manifest differently across sexes. Criado Perez exposes how entrenched assumptions that men represent the standard human have distorted the foundations of medical science in ways that literally sicken women. Her analysis reveals the urgency of reforming research design itself to finally account for biological sex and gender differences rather than continuing to marginalize women. The deadly consequences outlined in these chapters make a powerful case that true equity in healthcare requires more than just increasing access – we must challenge the flawed paradigms that render women’s needs invisible. Criado Perez calls for a fundamental shift in how we produce medical knowledge to end the normalization of male bodies and ensure no harm comes from excluding half the population. Her work illustrates how feminist perspectives can intervene against ingrained biases and lifesaving change often emerges from giving voice to the invisible. The chapters serve as a sobering reminder that diversity, representation and inclusion cannot remain afterthoughts if research aims to serve all of humanity equitably.
“Invisible Women” by Caroline Criado Perez discusses how assuming male physiology in medical treatments affects women, leading to negative health outcomes.
In Chapters 10 and 11, the book examines how the historical idea of men as the standard human physiology in Western philosophy still influences modern biomedicine today.
This mindset results in a disregard for sex-specific differences, as physicians frequently overlook the inclusion of women in many medical treatments.
To address the problems discussed in the reading, it’s crucial for society to make a significant shift towards being more inclusive of gender. Acknowledging the widespread impact of gender data gaps, everyone, including individuals, institutions, and policymakers, must actively work to eliminate ingrained biases.
In today’s readings, we discussed how the current model of testing and data collection specifically in the medical field had failed, because of how it has assumed that male and female bodies are the same when it comes to being treated, adapting to the elements, fighting diseases, or responding to a certain medication dosage. The reality is that the female body is very different from the male body, and yet when it comes to medical studies being conducted even in the present day, it is rare for these studies to take gender into account when forming control groups or when seeking more depth for their data.
Because of how the female immune system and cardiovascular systems work, and how female bodyfat ratios are different, women react to certain drugs differently, and have different symptoms than men do, particularly when it comes to the heart. Because medicine is rooted in teaching its doctors and nurses to think of the male anatomy as the “default”, women are not being properly treated, and are often misdiagnosed much more than men. Ultimately, for hospitals and medicine, in general, to be the most effective, medical research and practice should move away from the archaic viewpoint that the male body is the basis for how the human body reacts to substances and diseases.
Chapter 10, “The Drugs Don’t Work,” begins with Michelle’s personal story. Michelle suffered for years from undiagnosed bowel issues, which were dismissed by male doctors as psychological. Eventually, a female GP correctly diagnosed her with irritable bowel syndrome and ulcerative colitis. This narrative leads to a broader discussion of systemic gender bias in medicine. The chapter highlights the historical and ongoing bias in medical education and research, where male bodies are considered the default. This bias extends from foundational assumptions in medical training to the underrepresentation of women in clinical trials. Despite clear evidence of physiological differences, female bodies are often considered mere variations of the male norm, leading to significant data gaps in understanding women’s health. From a computer scientist’s point of view, this chapter underscores the critical importance of data representation and bias in any field, including medicine. In computer science, algorithms and models are only as good as the data they are trained on. If the data is biased or unrepresentative, the outcomes will be skewed and potentially harmful. This mirrors the issue in medical research, where the underrepresentation of women leads to biased and incomplete medical knowledge. While Chapter 11, “Yentl Syndrome,” delves into the concept of how women’s medical issues are often misdiagnosed or treated inadequately unless their symptoms align with those typically found in men. The term is derived from the 1983 film “Yentl,” where a woman disguises herself as a man to receive education. This metaphor extends to how women’s health issues are often overlooked or misunderstood in a healthcare system biased towards male norms.
Yentl syndrome, the topic of chapter 11, was particularly interesting to me because it is something I’ve heard discussed before, but never given name to. Essentially, yentl syndrome is “the phenomenon whereby women are misdiagnosed and poorly treated unless their symptoms or diseases conform to that of men.” The chapter pointed out some physical differences that cause rampant underdiagnosis, which were of course very interesting and disappointing as it leaves over half the global population chronically undertreated, but I especially appreciated the discussion of how the socialization of women often compounds this issue. I connected with the discussion of underdiagnosing autism in women because they are often socialized into much heavier masking, as this exact phenomena caused my own ASD to be misdiagnosed (and treated, sometimes medicated even, under the ill context of these wrong diagnoses, which did not help the matter at all) three separate times before I was finally able to get an accurate diagnosis in my senior year of high school. Having an accurate diagnosis has been massive for my understanding of myself and has allowed me to gain accommodations I desperately needed, and not being treated for conditions I don’t have has, naturally, been a game changer for not exacerbating my symptoms or altering my brain chemistry in ways that don’t serve me, but being able to continue to seek that out is a huge privilege not everyone can access that almost definitely causes massive damage to countless lives. I also am very glad they acknowledged that it’s not just underdiagnosing women vs men by a prioritization of men’s symptoms but also just a general hesitance to acknowledge women’s pain, even when they are more likely than men to have a certain condition (like IBS, as the book mentioned). The historic depiction of women as hysteric and as sensitive contributes to this persistent denial, when in reality they’re just unheard, which makes them seem to be confirming a stereotype of hysteria, which furthers this vicious cycle. In my own experience, my hEDS (the most common form of Ehlers Danlos syndrome, of which 90% of people with it by some reports are women), can leave me in immense pain that makes many basic daily movements excruciating, and while I try to just do life as normal, when I do have to bring it up, even to people I’ve talked to about my chronic pain, I’ve often been asked if it’s just “my time of the month”, suggesting that the pain I experience can only ever be my period.
As a disabled woman who has dealt repeatedly with the healthcare system, none of this is surprising at all, it’s just really sad and upsetting. Nonetheless, I feel like its an important read, not necessarily for the people who already get it, live it, know it, but for the people who don’t, because having the idea of health based around you and how your body and your mind work is an aspect of male privilege I don’t really hear discussed, but one that women (and folks with non-male anatomy) know all too well.
Today’s reading threw so many seemingly impossible but sad and true facts that it was almost hard to all take in. I have lived in a medical system that is specifically built upon learning from the biology of the white man. The discrepancy between the fact that women account for 80% of pharmaceuticals (p. 96) and are simultaneously missing in most medical research is alarming. I also thought about how much of the readings only talked about the medical horrors experienced by women in comparison to men. I can only imagine that the medical statistics for people who are non-binary must also be tragic and that their stories must also contain deeply saddening windows into a dark reality of the faults laden in the current Western medicine system.
Something I could not get over in chapter 10 was the pure amount of research that, despite it being 2023, must still only focus on male biology. Therefore, reading about the Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller in preparation for today’s reading became all the more important. In Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez mentions how much of the research is focused on men. After Muller talked about “Improving numbers through omission or distortion data” (p.24), I could not help but think the same thing, to some degree, is happening with the studies referred to by the reading. Surely, researchers are looking into what they know can produce results that agree with their, whether aware or not, male-centered hypotheses. Certainly, that means researching the health effects on predominately male study groups.
This was a really great reading. We’ve been exposed to major injustices in the healthcare system through this class before, but this reading really broke things out of practicing healthcare itself and into education and research. It’s unbelievable how little medical students are required to understand female bodies unless they choose to focus specifically on female systems, despite the fact that women can respond differently to identical drugs, conditions, and symptoms. It’s even more unbelievable how some researchers are willing to ignore all of this to publish articles that claim sex-differential research is a waste of time and pulls time and resources away from directly addressing diseases themselves. Sure, maybe it pulls some minds away from pure medical research, but what good is a treatment if it helps one half of the world, but could kill the other?
It’s an incredibly uncomfortable truth that women go so ignored in healthcare. I can’t imagine going to a doctor, sharing and explaining what may be incredibly uncomfortable aspects of my health and life, and being dismissed. This cycle of dismissal ultimately prevents women from seeking out ways to address their symptoms, and causes many preventable deaths. So much focus is on finding a “good” doctor, as in one that will listen to you, instead of systemically creating doctors that will listen to women.
I think this legacy, all through history, of painting women as an aberration of men has been one of the most damaging we continue to face. Only in recent years have some portions of society been able to look back and realize the unlimited cruelty and carelessness women have faced in the medical field. Only fifty years ago, lobotomies were still being recommended “for women in abusive relationships.” I can only imagine the things we will look back on in fifty more years.
I was by no means surprised by the reading for this week. I and probably many other students in our class resonated with the experiences of women seeking treatment in both chapters. The information on the underrepresentation (and complete erasure in some cases) of women in medical trials reaffirms a reality I recognize. I think the chapters had a lot of positives, however I found the overall analysis of inequality of women’s treatment in the medical system as lacking sustained engagement with intersections of race, class, weight, etc. that play into this inequality. For example, some of the discussions of disability and Black womanhood we saw in earlier modules were very relevant to these discussions. I was also thinking about the general treatment of fat people by doctor’s and the medical establishment. The BMI system was developed using the white male body as default and representative (the overwhelming standard in the medical system). This was not really discussed in the first chapter we read, and I think it is very relevant to the overall conversations that these chapters interact with. To individuals whose BMI is not in the “normal”/”healthy” category, weight loss/ diet/ exercise is often the first (and often only) suggestion from doctors, and this leads to plenty of missed diagnoses (also discussed in the chapters). Honestly that was one of the things I had a hard time getting past, despite many of the positive aspects of the reading.
Not much in this reading was very surprising to me, as I along with many people I know have also had several experiences being misdiagnosed, especially with pain in the body being attributed to the menstrual cycle when that wasn’t the case. I did think that testing medications/drugs at different stages of the menstrual cycle was a really good point that Perez brought up, given the fluctuation in hormone levels; I found it crazy the lack of testing medication on the demographic who the medication is meant for. The phenomenon of misdiagnosis and mistreatment for those who don’t conform to the symptoms of men or the “standard” extends to past readings in this class and in others—for example, racism embedded in the medical field leading to black patients not receiving quality healthcare. The idea of credibility from previous readings also applies to these ones, as there are a multitude of doctors that won’t believe women when they discuss symptoms (or play down the severity of their described symptoms) regardless of how qualified they are, leading to misdiagnosis or lack of any diagnosis, ultimately harming the patient in the long run.
The reading talks about the invisible women in the medical field. Yentl Syndrome describes the concept of how women’s medical issues are often treated inadequately unless their symptoms align with those found in men. Women and minority groups cannot get cared for and well-treated only if they have similar syndromes as men. Due to the underrepresented feature of women in the medical field, there are lots of women-specific diseases that haven’t been explored and researched. Due to the for-profit purpose, the medical industries need to focus on those diseases that many people have and those who have money and power. This leads to insufficient research on rare diseases and diseases in minorities in the men-dominated world. Just like people who have HIV used to be discriminated against, those people cannot get good treatment and are afraid of asking for help.
It’s always frustrating to read about examples of deeply embedded discrimination, but as others have pointed out, it’s not especially surprising. Practically every major institution (especially within the sciences) is fundamentally misogynistic and discriminatory to anybody who is not cis, white, and a man. This is dangerous in any field, but is especially troubling in medicine, as negligence through sexist practices lead to serious physical damage and death. In a field that is supposed to be objective and scientific, bias has seeped into every aspect of medicine, through training, documentation, and practice. As Perez pointed out, this is not from the actions of “a few bad apples”, but is a part of the system. It’s at this point expected that women be brushed off, or considered “manic” for expressing concern. We often think about this negligence in relation to the overall dangerous practices of medicine from the past, but we also refuse to acknowledge that it still happens all the time.
As computer scientists, we need to look at the failures of other fields and reflect on how they relate to our own. Sexism is also rampant in our field, and it is also not the work of a few bad apples, but institutionalized. Misogyny can’t be solved through inaction and just hoping things will get better; we need to look at the state of our respective institutions and fundamentally change the way things are being taught and practiced, and not hide behind the biased “objectivity” that comes with being a science.
Today’s reading reflected a frustrating truth about the way the health system works and how it negatively impacts women in multiple ways. From the lack of studies done regarding medicine and the female body to the rejection of drugs that worked better in women than in men, Criado Perez enumerates many ways in which the health system has failed women. What is more concerning is the question of why nothing is being done about it, given there is enough evidence pointing out this problem. Additionally, she traces the issue back to the beginning of medical practices, where the female body was merely seen as a dysfunctional male body instead of being considered unique and different. One of Criado Perez’s arguments that I found particularly interesting was how she points out that this problem isn’t only observed in humans but also transcends our understanding of different animal species. Overall, it was a compelling text that sheds light on and raises awareness of a problem that is evident for women but might not be as apparent for men.
These readings were really depressing. I almost think the term gender bias isn’t drastic enough to label what is happening in the health care system. It feels adjacent to eugenics in a way. This is a bit of a tangent, but these readings made me think about the pejorative perspective most people have towards non-Western medicine. It makes sense that people that feel neglected by the health care system would turn to more holistic practices that reinforce their agency, especially those with marginalized identities. The medical system is not serving large sectors of the population, and this has been widely ignored for decades. I think there is this perception that people that distrust the medical system are paranoid or conspiratorial, when in reality there are legitimate reasons why that distrust exists.
I think chapter 10 from today’s reading is a clear example of how ignoring social realities in data collection are not only an oversight but can actively perpetuate harm. Both chapters in conjunction also point to the reality that, if so much of the population is not adequately serviced by current medical understandings, then it must not be that they are an aberration but that the sample population from which this data is collected is skewed. So, even if we are to limit ourselves to the realm of the quantitative when critiquing these medical studies, there are inherent flaws in the experimental design (particularly in its sampling). Additionally, these sampling bias result from social biases, which leads us back to the idea that you cannot simply excise science that deals with the social from this reality. We see all of this in these chapters, and they don’t even really delve into intersectional analysis of the issue. Since biological sex is a spectrum, what about the data gap there? Thinking back to Cottom – we see that healthcare is not only gendered, but is structured by all prevalent social power structures (despite it “just” being science).
Within the two chapters from “Invisible Women” by Caroline Criado Perez dives into how women are getting the short end of the stick in medical research. It’s like we’re living in a world where men are the default setting for everything, even medical studies. From heart devices that don’t quite do the trick for women to painkillers that seem to work differently, it’s a mess. The author points out that women not only get less attention in trials, but when they do, the results often don’t apply to them. It’s a wake-up call about how we’re ignoring women’s health issues, from PMS to childbirth complications. The plea for a revolution in medical research hits hard, urging everyone to see that women aren’t just men with a few tweaks – they have their own unique health needs that we’re blatantly ignoring. It’s time for a change.
A lot of the things discussed in the two chapters of Invisible Women were brought up earlier this semester. Specifically, we started out the class talking about our identities and how there is the perception that there is the “default” identity. I think this is already problematic in how underprivileged and marginalized identities are treated in society, but it’s even more detrimental when it’s applied to professional industries where people’s lives are put at risk. In this case, men’s anatomy is considered the “default” anatomy and is the only thing taken into consideration in clinical trials and medical research, which excludes women from the entire process and endangers their health. They have a lower chance of receiving the appropriate medical treatment that they need, partly because of the implicit biases by modern medical practitioners but also because the drugs that are prescribed for them might not even be invented or tested on them in the first place.
Reading about the disparity in healthcare research is always disheartening. It is baffling to think that we would not design our studies to be as comprehensive and fine-grained as possible. One of the most jarring comments in the reading for today was the mention that “the lack of comparable data arising from the historical data gap makes including women inadvisable[.]” How is it possible that we can think that it is unreasonable to include more women in studies because we have historically excluded them from studies. The worst part is that the people making these claims recognize that there could be a difference between treatment effectiveness. How can we just sit idle when desegregation of gender and the inclusion of women at a higher percentage could save so many lives. Then you have “the all-male-authored paper [that] concluded that, no, the problem was not ‘real’.” “The problem” here being that women are underrepresented in medical studies. How is this possible when we have many cases of women encountering adverse treatment because of historically biased studies. It is just crazy to think that we have improved the abilities of our healthcare to such an extent and still seek new improvements while ignoring the lived experiences of so many women.
These readings are pretty eye-opening to me as I never really considered my biology textbooks, where the anatomy of a human body is mainly portrayed with a male body. Having read these chapters afterwards, I was quite surprised by how the lack of representation there is for women. The fact that we are generalizing sex differences in anatomy is very concerning, as the author does point out the different body responses women send out as they are faced with a certain problem. It is very shocking to hear about how sex differences don’t matter and how some researchers advocate against the inclusion of women in research. This causes the “vast majority of drugs, including anaesthetics and chemotherapeutics, continue with gender-neutral dosages, which put women at risk of overdoes”. I am quite curious as to how this has happened and was able to maintain this sort of mindset for such a long time. How have we as a society been able to maintain this idea that the male body is neutral and a norm? These concepts made me think how this tied to our previous readings about not being concerned about other parties or disadvantaged groups and only concerning with the current problem they hear. To see that it is not just a technological problem, but a society problem as well, makes me concern as to how we could possibly be more aware about this problem and be able to make a change. Because we see that the way we think currently is affecting how we approach our technological problems, we are only making our “efficient” solutions a bad option. So I am curious, what can we do to make people aware of this as well as how can we change their minds about the current problem and make them know that this is the wrong mindset.