The Cost of Silence: Why Women’s Health Still Isn’t Taken Seriously & What It Costs Us

For generations, women have been taught to tolerate their pain, minimize their symptoms, and to wait it out. Women have been dismissed, and made to believe discomfort is just a part of life. 

Even though women make up more than half of the population, women’s health has historically been underfunded, underresearched, and ignored. The result? Delayed diagnoses, dismissed symptoms, preventable complications, and a system that too often treats women’s pain as anecdotal rather than urgent. 

For decades, women were excluded from clinical trials under the assumption that hormonal cycles made data “too complex” (National Institutes of Health, 2016). Even after policy changes in the 1990s required inclusion, meaningful sex-specific analysis has remained behind the curve. 

A study in 2020 found that fewer than 10% of biomedical research studies analyzed results by sex, even when both men and women were included in the research (Sugimoto et al., 2020). To put it plainly, that means that treatments, medications, and diagnostic criteria are still largely based on male physiology. 

The consequences are clear. 

• Women are more likely than men to experience adverse drug reactions (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2019). 

• Women with chronic pain wait longer for diagnoses and are more likely to be told their symptoms are psychological (Samulowitz et al., 2018). 

• Conditions that disproportionately affect women, like endometriosis, pelvic floor disorders, menopause, and autoimmune disease, remain severely underfunded relative to their prevalence (Perez et al., 2019). 

Additionally, delays in diagnosis are one of the most common, and most damaging, outcomes of gender bias in medicine. 

For example, endometriosis. Despite the fact that endometriosis affects 1 in 10 women of reproductive age, the average time to diagnosis in the United States is seven to ten years (Zondervan et al., 2020). During that time, patients are often told that their pain is “normal,” “stress,” or “just a bad period.” 

This isn’t just women’s sexual health, though. The same pattern appears throughout the field of women’s health. 

• Women experiencing heart attacks are more likely to be misdiagnosed or sent home from the emergency rooms (Mehta et al., 2016)

• Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, largely due to dismissal of symptoms and delayed care (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022).

When pain isn’t believed, care for women is delayed. When their care is delayed, the harm compounds.

And underinvesting in women’s health isn’t just harmful to individual women; it’s expensive, and we all pay the price. 

Research from the McKinsey Health Institute estimates that closing the women’s health gap could add $1 trillion annually to the global economy by 2040, through improved health outcomes, workforce participation, and productivity (McKinsey Health Institute, 2024). 

In the United States alone, chronic gynecologic conditions contribute to billions in lost wages and healthcare costs each year. Untreated menopause symptoms are linked to increased absenteeism and exits of the workforce. Delayed diagnoses lead to higher treatment costs in the long-term, and worse prognoses. 

When women are included in research, when data is analyzed with sex and gender in mind, when funding prioritizes quality of life, our outcomes improve. We develop new treatments. We increase the standards of our care. Supporting women’s research is the difference between years of unanswered questions and dismissal, and a timely diagnosis. 

At SHE+, we believe women deserve to be heard. Silence has always been too expensive, and research is how we change the narrative. 

References: 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2022). Working together to reduce Black maternal mortality.https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/features/maternal-mortality/index.html

Kingsberg, S. A., Larkin, L. C., Liu, J. H., & Pinkerton, J. V. (2019). Clinical challenges in perimenopause and menopause management. Obstetrics and Gynecology, 134(6), 1139–1148.https://doi.org/10.1097/AOG.0000000000003565

McKinsey Health Institute. (2024). Closing the women’s health gap: A $1 trillion opportunity.https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi

Mehta, L. S., et al. (2016). Acute myocardial infarction in women. Circulation, 133(9), 916–947.https://doi.org/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000351

National Institutes of Health. (2016). NIH policy on sex as a biological variable.https://orwh.od.nih.gov/sex-gender/nih-policy-sex-biological-variable

Samulowitz, A., et al. (2018). “Bringing a knife to a gunfight”: Gender bias in healthcare. Social Science & Medicine, 200, 191–199.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.01.035

Sugimoto, C. R., et al. (2020). Sex differences in clinical studies. The Lancet, 393(10171), 541–549.https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)32995-7

U.S. Food & Drug Administration. (2019). Women and adverse drug reactions.https://www.fda.gov/science-research/womens-health-research

Zondervan, K. T., et al. (2020). Endometriosis. The Lancet, 396(10257), 730–743.https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31598-8