Gender, Health & Inequalities

From knee pain to asthma or heart attacks - the diagnosis and treatment methods of our medical system are tailored to the standard man.

Women are twice as likely to die of a heart attack, suffer more frequently from the side effects of medication, or live with undetected illnesses. For centuries, medicine has pretended that there is only one gender. Since women are underrepresented in clinical studies, these differences are often only discovered after market approval. And while men's pain is taken seriously, women still have to fight against the myth of the "hysterical woman". "As much as we need social equality between men and women, we also need unequal treatment in medicine", says gender medicine expert Alexandra Kautzky Willer from the University of Vienna. This applies to all areas of medicine: Research, diagnosis, and treatment.