Institutional Gaslighting Part III: Medical Misogyny
International Women's Day passed yesterday, with its usual mixture of celebration and stock-taking. This year it was followed by the publication of a report from Mumsnet, drawing on nearly a decade's worth of posts from their platform documenting what women have been saying, in their own words, about their experiences of NHS healthcare.
Half of the women surveyed believed they had been dismissed or ignored by a medical professional because of their sex. Nearly two thirds had been explicitly told their pain was normal, or that it was in their head. Sixty-eight per cent felt that the NHS simply does not take women's health concerns seriously.
Wes Streeting used the phrase medical misogynyand that, at least, is something. But I want to sit with what these numbers actually mean, not only as policy failures, which they certainly are, but as psychological injuries. Because when an institution repeatedly tells you that your experience of your own body is wrong, something happens inside a person that goes well beyond frustration or inconvenience. It reshapes how you relate to yourself.
What Medical Misogyny Looks Like in Practice
The phrase medical misogyny does not suggest that individual clinicians consciously hold misogynistic attitudes. Rather, it describes patterns within medical systems that consistently disadvantage women. These patterns often appear in familiar forms. Pain is minimised. Symptoms are normalised. Physical complaints are reframed as emotional distress. Investigation is delayed or deferred.
One woman quoted in the report described going to her GP with a burning band of pain around her uterus and being told she “seemed very emotional” and should consider counselling. Another spent twenty-two years seeking answers for pelvic pain before finally receiving a diagnosis. Twenty-two years is not a diagnostic inconvenience. It is a significant portion of a person's life.
The consequences of these patterns are visible across multiple areas of medicine. Women experiencing heart attacks are around 50 per cent more likely than men to receive an initial incorrect diagnosis, in part because diagnostic frameworks were historically developed around male symptom patterns.
The Normalisation of Women's Pain
The particular cruelty of being told pain is “normal” lies partly in how the phrase operates. On its surface it resembles reassurance, but in practice it often closes down the conversation. It suggests that the person experiencing the pain has misinterpreted their own body and that the appropriate response is not further investigation but endurance.
The Mumsnet report notes that reassurance in these cases was frequently experienced not as comfort but as dismissal, and that gap between clinical intent and patient experience is worth examining closely. Most doctors offering these responses are not consciously dismissive. They are working within a system that has historically treated women's pain as psychological, exaggerated, or simply part of the natural condition of having a female body.
Structural assumptions of that kind shape clinical judgement in ways that are often invisible to the clinicians themselves.
Waiting as a Form of Harm
Waiting itself becomes a form of harm. The report describes women being placed in a prolonged “wait and see” cycle rather than being offered investigation or treatment. One woman lost two fallopian tubes, an ovary and a section of bowel while waiting for endometriosis surgery. She noted that her fertility and bowel function would likely have been preserved had treatment been offered earlier.
Endometriosis affects roughly one in ten women, yet diagnosis still takes on average eight to nine years. For women from ethnically diverse communities that delay increases further, with diagnosis taking on average around eleven years. During those years many women are repeatedly reassured that their symptoms are normal or stress related.
The psychological effect of waiting lies in the fact that it is presented not as refusal but as postponement. And postponement, when repeated often enough, gradually weakens a person's confidence that their suffering warrants urgency.
Structural Gaps in Women's Healthcare
Part of the explanation for these patterns lies in research priorities. Less than 2.5 per cent of publicly funded research in the UK is dedicated specifically to reproductive health despite the fact that these conditions affect more than half the population.
Healthcare capacity also plays a role. As of March 2026, nearly 750,000 women in England were on waiting lists for gynaecology care.
The broader picture is visible in international comparisons as well. Recent global analyses suggest that the United Kingdom currently has the largest gender health gap among G20 countries and the twelfth largest globally.
None of this implies that clinicians are deliberately dismissive. Most doctors are working under considerable pressure in systems that are themselves under strain. But structural bias does not require malicious intent in order to produce consistent outcomes.
Medical Misogyny Beyond Medicine
Medical misogyny is not confined to medicine alone. Healthcare systems do not exist outside society. Doctors, training institutions and diagnostic frameworks inevitably reflect the broader cultural assumptions within which they operate. For centuries women's pain, emotions and physical experiences have been framed as excessive, exaggerated or overly emotional. The stereotype of the woman who is “too much”, too sensitive, too dramatic, too emotional, remains deeply embedded in social attitudes.
Another everyday example of how these assumptions operate appears in a question many women recognise immediately. In medical consultations women are frequently asked where they are in their hormonal cycles, or whether they may be premenopausal or menopausal, regardless of the symptom they present with. Headaches, fatigue, pain, mood changes, digestive symptoms and a wide range of other complaints are often first filtered through the possibility that they may be “hormonal”. Hormonal fluctuations can of course affect health, but the underlying assumption is revealing. Women's symptoms are often initially interpreted through the lens of hormones, suggesting instability or temporary emotional influence. In contrast, men's symptoms are rarely approached with the same starting assumption that their bodies are governed by fluctuating hormonal states.
The difference in diagnostic framing reflects a broader cultural idea that women's bodies are inherently governed by hormones and therefore less reliable narrators of their own physical experience. When this assumption is combined with the routine normalisation of menstrual pain, it creates a framework in which many symptoms can be easily dismissed. The logic becomes circular. Migraines are attributed to hormones. Pain during menstruation is considered normal. If pain is expected during a woman's cycle, then the pain she reports is interpreted as normal rather than as something that requires investigation.
When these cultural assumptions enter clinical settings they shape interpretation. A woman's report of pain may be unconsciously filtered through longstanding ideas that women's bodies are inherently unstable or that their distress is more likely psychological than physiological. In this sense medical misogyny is not an isolated malfunction of the healthcare system. It reflects broader societal beliefs about women's credibility, authority over their own bodies and the legitimacy of their suffering. Understanding this wider context matters because it helps explain why these patterns appear repeatedly across different clinicians, institutions and generations. Medicine does not create these assumptions from nothing. It inherits them.
What This Looks Like From the Therapy Room
From the perspective of psychotherapy, the effects of repeated dismissal are often visible long after the medical consultation has ended. Women who have spent years being told their symptoms are psychological frequently arrive having lost not only trust in the healthcare system but also confidence in their own bodies and perceptions. They describe second guessing their reactions, qualifying their pain, or feeling the need to justify their symptoms extensively before seeking help again. A 2025 study found that women who experienced medical dismissal were around 40 per cent more likely to report high levels of health related anxiety in the following year even when their underlying condition was eventually diagnosed and treated.
The experience of dismissal does not end when the patient leaves the consultation room. It often follows her home. These dynamics overlap with what is often described as medical gaslighting, a phenomenon I have written about extensively here. But the significance of Streeting's phrase medical misogyny is that it shifts the focus away from individual interactions and toward the broader structures that make those interactions predictable.
I have lost count of the women who have sat opposite me and tried to describe these experiences, often struggling to know where to begin. They bring into the room the frustration of living with pain that has not been taken seriously, the fear of not knowing what their symptoms mean, and the gradual doubt that develops when your own bodily experience has repeatedly been questioned. It can take time before they feel safe enough to speak openly about what has happened and to trust that they will be believed.
Acknowledgement Without Reform Changes Nothing
Justine Roberts of Mumsnet said it plainly when the report was published. Politicians have repeatedly acknowledged that women's health has been historically overlooked, but acknowledgement without reform changes nothing.
The report calls for mandatory training for health professionals on sex specific bias and women's health, an end to the routine normalisation of women's pain in clinical settings, and the creation of dedicated women's health hubs across England's 42 NHS regions. I agree that these measures are extremely important. Structural problems require structural responses, and improving clinical training in sex specific medicine is a necessary part of that work.
International Women's Day can create moments of reflection and public attention. But the women described in that report were not suffering on International Women's Day. They were suffering on an ordinary weekday in a consultation room, being told their pain was normal and leaving unsure whether their own body could be trusted. That is where the real work of addressing medical misogyny has to happen.
