ABSTRACT
One great gift of the women’s movement has been its insistence that there is no neutral genderless, objective position from which to view the world or speak about it. Overarching concerns that women have expressed regarding health care include: their exclusion from how health care is delivered and managed; trivialisation and negation of their self-defined health concerns; high levels of medical intervention; and the focus on specific diseases/conditions at the expense of the ‘whole’ person. The dominant themes in Australian women's health include being treated with dignity and respect; being allowed access to informed decision-making; and being offered improved access to services. Feminist interventions in research methodology have been central to the arguments mounted by the women’s health movement and the policy directions taken. Systematic bias in the form of exclusion of women from major clinical research trials has been identified as a significant problem.
