“Gender bias in healthcare is not just persistent: its pervasive. Women’s voices have been questioned, minimised, or outright dismissed, often with devastating, even fatal, consequences.”
This trailblazing book shines a light on the uncomfortable truths we all need to confront within gender bias in healthcare. Centred on patient stories and lived experience, this comprehensively researched, evidence-based resource amplifies women’s voices where they have too often been undermined.
From heart health and reproductive health, to eating disorders, birth trauma, and autism, Jinty Sheerin and Louise Hockings-Thompson invite readers, particularly healthcare professionals, to listen, reflect, and act.
This book is an urgent and compassionate call to action, and a vitally important step towards clinical excellence and women’s health.
This trailblazing book shines a light on the uncomfortable truths we all need to confront within gender bias in healthcare. Centred on patient stories and lived experience, this comprehensively researched, evidence-based resource amplifies women’s voices where they have too often been undermined.
From heart health and reproductive health, to eating disorders, birth trauma, and autism, Jinty Sheerin and Louise Hockings-Thompson invite readers, particularly healthcare professionals, to listen, reflect, and act.
This book is an urgent and compassionate call to action, and a vitally important step towards clinical excellence and women’s health.
Reviews
If you're a woman who's been fobbed off, misdiagnosed, or patronised in the healthcare system - so if you're a woman - then this book is for you. Medical misogyny gets a serious run for its money from Jinty Sheerin and Louise Hockings-Thompson, on their quest to expose the gender health gap and make sure the next generation has it better.
Tackling Gender Bias in the Healthcare System is the book I wish every woman had on her shelf before she ever needed it. Chapter after chapter - heart disease, endometriosis, PMDD, anorexia, birth trauma, ovarian and vulval cancers, menopause - lays bare the same pattern: pain dismissed, symptoms delayed, instincts disbelieved, by the very system meant to care for us. Each condition is different, but the thread running through all of them is painfully familiar. The chapter on POI is the one I know from the inside. It doesn't just explain the condition - it tells the truth about what it costs to be diagnosed with something so poorly understood and so quietly carried. It captures the specific, disorientating grief of a diagnosis that arrives without a roadmap, and it does so with a precision that only comes from genuinely listening to the women who've lived it.
What strikes me most is that this book doesn't stop at telling our stories - it hands clinicians the tools to do better: the reflective questions, the practical steps, the honest reckoning with where care has failed. That combination is rare, and it's why this book matters beyond the page. Books like this change what the next woman in that consultation room is told, and what she isn't left to discover alone.
As a doctor we are trusted to hear patients concerns in order to treat their symptoms. This book highlights the need for us to not just hear but really listen to those stories, in order for us to really make a difference. I am a big fan of Jinty and Lou's podcast and the book encapsulates their fierce campaign to improve the healthcare system for women.
For too long women have been told that their pain is imagined or exaggerated. This book names that for exactly what it is - systemic bias with real, sometimes devastating consequences. It manages to hold the personal and the political in the same hand. The patient stories are unflinching, and the research is meticulous, but what stays with you is the quiet, galvanising rage. This is essential reading for every woman who has ever left a doctor's appointment feeling like she was the problem.
Louise Hockings Thompson and Jinty Sheerin have outdone themselves. An exceptional and accessible work on exactly the why gender matters in health. If you liked Invisibe Women and Do No Harm, you'll love this. It's the human side and it brings home why gender matters in women's health. I couldn't not be prouder of Lou and Jinty. They've nailed this, showing the misogyny, the misery and discrimination that women endure at the hands of the health system, but with a blueprint to make it better. This may be a hard read for some healthcare professionals but it's a must read - and a must read for all. It brings home exactly how women are currently treated and what needs to change. This book matters. Read it if you care about women and women's health.
Staggeringly comprehensive and compassionate. A vital, urgent resource for every home. And for every clinician.