ABSTRACT
One particular question of interest here concerns the differences between what is defined as ‘health’ for men and what counts as ‘health’ for women. In the 1970s, as a consequence of the feminist movement, challenges were mounted to the idea that health is the same for all. In America, the National Women’s Health Network was established in 1975. The Society for Women’s Health Research currently argues that women’s difference from men is not only social and cultural, but physical, with gender differences present in bone, in the reaction to certain drugs, and in the function of the immune system. Its website announces that ‘Sex differences exist in virtually every system in the body.’1 In the modern West, disease can be gendered in
a way that adversely affects women’s health. For example, lung cancer and coronary heart disease are regarded as ‘men’s diseases’ (Narrigan et al. 1997: 553). Although women’s mortality from coronary heart disease is as high as that of men, it is wrongly believed that cancer poses a greater risk to them, and so female patients may ignore the symptoms of heart disease, while their doctors in turn may be reluctant to send them for tests. They may be therefore be diagnosed only at an advanced stage of the disease (Villablanca 2000). Furthermore, in pharmaceutical research, there is a long tradition of seeing men as the norm, and women as a variation on that norm (Stanton et al. 2000: 616-17). The way in which drug trials are conducted as controlled experiments, with variables reduced as far as possible, means that it is normal practice to use as a sample an all-male group. For example, research showing that aspirin can prevent heart disease was carried out on a sample of 22,000 subjects: all men (Narrigan et al. 1997: 573-4, n. 1). Women’s exclusion from drug trials is also defended on the grounds that they may be pregnant – so that there is a risk of an unborn child being affected by the drugs being tested – and that their hormonal cycle in any case makes them too variable (Narrigan et al. 1997: 555); yet, of course, they will eventually be prescribed the drugs which have only been tested on men.
