Last week at the ISPAD conference in Lisbon, I was lucky enough to meet renowned diabetes advocate Jaz Sethi, and together we launched new resources including: #language problems and women with diabetes. Jazz and her team at Diabesties came up with this idea and worked with many women in the diabetes community to bring this resource to life and add it to their growing and stable organization. #LanguageMatters Resources. I was one of those women.
So why do we need a specific document that highlights the challenges women with diabetes face and how language can be used to overcome these challenges?
Let's talk about gender bias in medicine.
Anyone with even a passing interest in health care knows that gender bias is very real and that women certainly face unique challenges. The situation is even worse for women of different backgrounds, sexual orientations, and gender identities.
This is why in 2017, the International Diabetes Federation focused its World Diabetes Day activities on women and children.
Below is just some information from that campaign that explains the issues women face.
- As a result of their socio-economic circumstances, especially in developing countries, girls and women with diabetes experience barriers in accessing cost-effective diabetes prevention, early detection, diagnosis, treatment and care.
- Socioeconomic inequalities expose women to major risk factors for diabetes, including poor diet and nutrition, physical inactivity, smoking, and harmful alcohol use.
- The stigma and discrimination faced by people with disabilities is particularly acute for girls and women, who bear the double burden of discrimination due to their health conditions and the inequalities practiced in male-dominated societies.
- These inequalities can discourage girls and women from seeking diagnosis and treatment and prevent them from achieving positive health outcomes.
Beyond diabetes, and in the medical world more generally, women's health concerns are frequently denied, downplayed, ignored, and often disbelieved. Women believe that the symptoms are not real, the pain is imaginary, and that we are overreacting. This attitude can have serious consequences. This is just furikake.
- Danish study of 6.9 million people Diabetes was diagnosed four and a half years later in women than in men. In women, cancer is diagnosed 2.5 years after cancer is diagnosed in men.
- This McKinsey report Diagnosis rates were shown to differ regarding gender-specific health conditions. Eight out of 10 women have not been diagnosed with menopause, and 6 out of 10 have not been diagnosed with PCOS. Meanwhile, only three out of ten men suffering from erectile dysfunction remain undiagnosed.
- Want to know more?Okay, It comes from England. Women are underdiagnosed, undertreated, and underrepresented in clinical trials targeting cardiovascular disease management strategies, and results have been shown to be less applicable to this subset.
Returning to the topic of diabetes, this lancet editorial:
- Compared to men, women with diabetes are disproportionately affected by depression and anxiety and have a reduced quality of life, which negatively impacts attitudes towards self-management and, in turn, disease outcomes. It may have a negative effect.
- Women with type 1 diabetes have a 40% higher excess risk of premature death than men with the disease, and women with type 2 diabetes have up to a 27% higher excess risk of stroke and an excess risk of coronary heart disease44 % higher.
- Women in high-income countries are less likely than men to receive guideline-recommended care
and, Recent studies published outside Canada Reported:
- Women with diabetes may face additional challenges related to gender-based discrimination and its impact on symptoms of depression
- Stigma was perceived to be more pronounced in women than in men.
None of this will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with gender bias in medicine. In fact, none of this should be surprising to anyone who has ever heard women talk about their experiences in the medical field.
So anything you can do to address this is a good idea, right?
Well, IDF Europe thinks so! in This articleone of their recommendations for addressing gender equality in diabetes is: Developing specific approaches to diabetes prevention, education, and care for women and girls. In other words, targeted, specific, and customized information is often needed to get your message across and address your issues.
This is a full circle, #language problems and women with diabetes Resources released last week. Special resources for women with diabetes, by women with diabetes. This book identifies problems and provides practical solutions to address them, highlighting gender bias in diabetes care and ensuring that women are treated with respect and that all our concerns are believed. I am asking you to do so.
Nowhere in this article do I deny that men with diabetes face challenges or that men with diabetes could benefit from focused information and resources. And the new language resources for women don't say that either. Still, it was an accusation in the cesspool that is Twitter. The video has been tweetedSo Jazz and I excitedly launched this new resource. Because “Whataboutism” is never far away.
Importance of diabetes was widely shared on social media and received an overwhelmingly positive response. But here's the kicker. What would be the only backlash? Targeted women. The man who shared it? I have nothing but praise for it. That's interesting. I feel like there are different standards for women. Maybe…I don't know…maybe I'm biased?