medical misogyny

Women have come to feel that doctors (mostly men) do not take what they say about their symptoms or their general state of health seriously, downplaying their pain and taking too much time to identify their problems (as with endometriosis).  More broadly, women are underrepresented in research.  It all goes back to the notion that women were hysterics, the old idea being that having a womb made you not quite sane, and that therefore women were likely to carry on about their problems and even fake symptoms to get attention.  Ideas that become entrenched can be very hard to overcome.  Even when at an official level they are no longer the norm, at some unconscious level they still operate.  This has been labelled medical misogyny , possibly in the hope that giving this unconscious bias against women a name may help to root it out.