Lack of Medical Information
There’s a chronic gap: data on the female body itself. It’s a big issue for women and it should be a normal part of how women look after their bodies. But you need to have information and data in order to do that.’ But there just was no data there . Fifty percent of the population have a vagina and yet there’s hardly any journal articles about this part of anatomy.
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‘There’s been very little innovation since the pill came out in the 1950s. I mean, in the history of technology that’s a long time.’ Menstruation has been ‘not just overlooked, but borderline actively ignored. We do a lot of work together with science institutions because there are really a lot of blank areas on the academic map. Like, what’s even considered a normal bleeding pattern for an adolescent woman? Science just doesn’t know what’s normal.’
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Given the male domination of VCs, data gaps are perhaps particularly problematic when it comes to tech aimed at women. ‘If you don’t have good data,’‘it’s harder to open people’s minds that something might be an issue if they don’t encounter it themselves.’
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The lack of sex-disaggregated data affects our ability to give women sound medical advice.
Medicine and drugs​
Doing Harm
by Maya Dusenbery
The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick
Medical trials​
Females aren’t even included in animal studies on female-prevalent diseases. Women are 70% more likely to suffer depression than men, for instance, but animal studies on brain disorders are five times as likely to be
done on male animals.64 A 2014 paper found that of studies on female- prevalent diseases that specified sex (44%), only 12% studied female
animals.65 Even when both sexes are included there is no guarantee the data will be sex-analysed: one paper reported that in studies where two sexes
were included, two-thirds of the time the results were not analysed by sex.