Psychology, like the rest of the medical profession, has demonstrated sexism and misogyny, and although much progress has been made, the problem continues to persist today.
From a historical point of view, from the end of the 1980s, health professionals and researchers in medicine or sociology, under the impetus of feminist movements, brought together the first discourse on the need to integrate the dimension of sex and gender into medicine and clinical research.
From the 1990s, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), responsible for the marketing authorization of drugs, wanted to improve the quality of clinical trials by now including the representation of women. Indeed, clinical trials on male and female subjects have only existed for 20 years in Europe; women were previously excluded from all medical research. The underrepresentation of women, or even their medical invisibility, has made this gender much more vulnerable to many diseases that had never been studied at the symptomatic level in the female body.
Furthermore, in France, questions such as ‘How does the menstrual cycle influence pain thresholds and pathologies? How does the symptomatology of a disease/condition in a man differ from that of a woman?’ have arrived far too late. The representation of women has therefore arrived very late in the medical field, and once present, we find stereotypes related to certain diseases and conditions that continue to promote virulent sexism.
For example, myocardial infarction is underdiagnosed in women because this disease is often associated with the profile of a man - a more or less stereotypical profile of a forty-year-old, stressed at work, overweight and who consumes a lot of alcohol. This stereotype, although widespread in and by the medical profession, has prevented the symptoms of this disease in women from being recognized and has resulted in missed diagnoses.
Conversely, with regard to mental health, depression appears to be a so-called "feminine" pathology, with women being on average twice as affected by depressive disorders as men. The statistics are there, yet the explanations struggle to make sense. The most often put forward explanation is that women are more influenced by hormonal fluctuations due to their menstrual cycles, pregnancy or menopause. However, more recent research shows that biological factors play only a minimal role compared to the influence of the economic and sociocultural environment, which exposes women more to the risks of depression. Precarious jobs, lack of resources, domestic and family responsibilities, and sexist and sexual violence constitute a major risk for women's mental and physical health. Women are more likely to experience traumatic and gynecological injuries, psychological and psychosomatic disorders, anxiety, addictive behaviors, and much more, not because of their genetic disposition but because of the pervasive sexism throughout society; a society that could be defined as 'poorly adapted' for the well-being and health of women.
This is why, for about twenty years, international medical research has been evolving to integrate the issue of gender into practices and research themes as well as to make a point of differentiating between sex and gender:
"It is important to distinguish between sex-related health differences and gender-related health inequalities. When we talk about health differences, we are essentially referring to the determinants of biological sex, while health inequalities concern sociocultural and economic factors related to gender. Thus, social gender codes among patients influence the expression of symptoms, the relationship to the body and the use of care. In the same way, among health professionals, social representations of so-called feminine or masculine diseases influence the interpretation of clinical signs and medical care. These gender norms come from afar because medicine has historically been built around the male body" Catherine Vidal, Neurobiologist, member of the Inserm Ethics Committee.
We therefore note that medical research is trying to include women in order to combat gender inequality. However, the gender issue still needs to be resolved since medicine often sets aside gender inequality - ignoring economic and sociocultural factors that are all too often disadvantageous for women.
We can conclude that integrating gender into medicine, research and more particularly psychology, responds to a questioning that is both scientific and ethical. The objective is to take into account the way in which social roles and the cultural context influence the health of women and men on a physiological and psychological level.
Bibliographie :
Genre et santé · Inserm, La science pour la santé. (s. d.). Inserm. https://www.inserm.fr/dossier/genre-et-sante/
P, J. (2023, 7 septembre). Quelle égalité des chances entre hommes et femmes dans la santé ? Santé Sur le Net, L’information Médicale Au Cœur de Votre Santé. https://www.sante-sur-le-net.com/egalite-chance-homme-femme-domaine-sante/
VIDAL C, Rapport du Haut Conseil à l'Égalité entre les femmes et les hommes," Prendre en compte le sexe et le genre pour mieux soigner : un enjeu de santé publique"
Inégalités de santé entre femmes et hommes : comment agir concrètement ? (s. d.). Institut Montaigne. https://www.institutmontaigne.org/expressions/inegalites-de-sante-entre-femmes-et-hommes-comment-agir-concretement
Santé Publique France, 2021. Discriminations : un enjeu majeur de santé publique. https://www.egalite-femmes-hommes.gouv.fr/sites/efh/files/migration/2021/05/Dossier-de-presse-Impact-des-discriminations-sur-la-sante-Vdef.pdf
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