Picture this. You’re sitting in a doctor’s office with a list of symptoms saved in your Notes app, because last time you forgot to mention one and the appointment was already wrapping up before you could circle back. The period pain has been bad enough to make you cancel plans twice this month. The fatigue is the kind that sleep doesn’t fix. You know something is off. You know your own body.

The doctor asks a few questions and types something into his computer. Then he says, “Everything looks normal. Probably just stress.” You smile, say thank you, and leave. And then somewhere on the drive home, it starts. The quiet negotiation with yourself. Maybe he’s right. You have been busy lately. Maybe you’re not drinking enough water. Maybe this is just what your body does now. By the time you find a parking spot, you’ve half-talked yourself out of the thing you were absolutely certain of an hour ago.

Sound familiar? Here’s what nobody says enough: that moment of self-doubt creeps up on you when the system keeps telling you that you’re the problem.

What if “probably just stress” was actually medical bias? (It was.)

For a staggering number of women, this isn’t a one-off. It’s practically a rite of passage. Persistent fatigue gets chalked up to lifestyle. Debilitating period pain becomes something to push through. Brain fog in your 40s? Burnout, darling.

These moments get written off as isolated bad luck, but researchers have increasingly connected the dots to reveal a much bigger picture: medical misogyny, the long-standing gender bias in healthcare that shapes how women’s symptoms are interpreted, studied, and treated. In plain terms, medical misogyny refers to the systemic ways medicine has historically undervalued, dismissed, or under-researched women’s health. The good news? We’re finally talking about it. And understanding where it comes from is the first step to changing it.

The original design flaw

Here’s a fun fact that isn’t actually fun at all: for centuries, medicine treated the male body as the universal blueprint. Women’s health complaints, rather than being taken at face value, were routinely filtered through an emotional or psychological lens.

In the 5th century BC, Hippocrates coined the term “hysteria” from the Greek word for uterus, building on the belief that the womb could physically wander around the body causing symptoms. His recommended cure? Marriage and pregnancy. By the 19th century, hysteria had become medicine’s catch-all diagnosis for women: fatigue, anxiety, abdominal pain, irritability. If a male doctor couldn’t explain it, hysteria covered it. It remained an official psychiatric diagnosis for over 2,000 years, only to be removed from the DSM in 1980. As Dr Elizabeth Comen, breast oncologist at NYU Langone, observed: “The question is, how does this show up in our healthcare system today? Because we’re so evolved. But are we?”

The answer is that the template hysteria created didn’t disappear with the diagnosis. It just got quieter. Women were excluded from clinical trials so systematically that it wasn’t until 1993 that the U.S. National Institutes of Health formally required their inclusion. The ripple effect of that gap is still being felt today.

When your symptoms don’t match the textbook

The dismissal doesn’t stay in the consultation room. It follows women into emergency departments, onto operating tables, and all the way to the prescription counter.

Take cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death among women in Singapore. Heart attacks in women frequently don’t look the way we’ve been taught to expect. Forget the dramatic clutch-your-chest moment. Women are more likely to show up with nausea, breathlessness, or fatigue. These were once labelled “atypical” symptoms, which, when you think about it, says more about who was running the research than anything about women’s bodies.

Despite affecting women and men at similar rates, women wait longer in emergency departments to be assessed for chest pain and are less likely to be referred for diagnostic testing at all. That’s gender bias in healthcare treatment, happening in the places that are supposed to be keeping us alive.

Take a breath, because it gets more frustrating.

Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine found women reporting chronic pain are more likely to be prescribed sedatives than actual pain relief. Sedatives. For pain. Not exactly the attentive care we were promised. Associate Professor Sophia Archuleta, head of NUH’s infectious diseases division, puts it plainly: the gender gap in healthcare often means women’s concerns get minimised, making every doctor’s appointment feel less like a consultation and more like a case you have to argue.

Medical misogyny examples: the diagnosis marathon nobody signed up for

If you’ve spent years bouncing between specialists with no real answers, you are in exhausting but very real company.

Take endometriosis. It affects roughly one in ten women of childbearing age globally, and around the same proportion here in Singapore, according to the World Health Organization. And yet the average time to diagnosis is still seven to eight years. Seven to eight years of being told your pain is normal.

Mojisola Erdt knows exactly what those years feel like. A senior scientist in Singapore, she first experienced the pain at 14. Pain that felt, in her own words, like “someone stabbing her and twisting the knife.” For nearly 30 years, she kept showing up to appointments, and her symptoms were managed, minimised, and moved past. By the time she was properly diagnosed with Stage 4 endometriosis, she had already suffered multiple miscarriages. In 2024, she made the heartbreaking decision to undergo a hysterectomy, closing the door permanently on having a second child. “It was hard to accept that this is really the end,” she said. “You know how sweet it is to have a child, and you want another one but you can’t.”

Then there’s Dr Eleanor Loh. Now a junior doctor, she spent a decade seeing six different doctors before being diagnosed with Stage 4 endometriosis at 26. A woman who was training to work in medicine couldn’t get medicine to take her seriously. The system she was preparing to join had spent ten years failing her as a patient. But the fact that she still chose to go into medicine after all of that speaks volumes. “You feel desperate and hopeless when the doctors you see don’t know what to do with you, treat you wrongly, or just dismiss you outright,” she said.

These are not rare cases. Women in online communities like r/endometriosis share near-identical stories every single day: years of being told their pain is psychological, exaggerated, or simply something to live with, before finally landing on a diagnosis that actually fits. One woman described waiting 15 years for answers, only getting there after pushing for surgery herself. Not because a doctor connected the dots but because she refused to stop asking.

The midlife chapter nobody warns you about

Menopause is having a long-overdue moment in the spotlight, and it’s about time. Symptoms like sleep disruption, anxiety, hot flushes and brain fog can seriously derail quality of life, yet local estimates cited alongside Singapore’s menopause care guidelines suggest around 70 per cent of women with moderate to severe symptoms never receive treatment. Professor Yan Li, an expert in femtech at ESSEC Business School, notes that in Southeast Asia, including Singapore, topics surrounding women’s sexual wellbeing, fertility and menopause remain culturally sensitive, which can make symptoms harder to raise even during medical consultations. The result is that generations of women have quietly assumed that feeling terrible is just the price of getting older. It isn’t.

Living longer, but not necessarily better

Singapore women outlive men by more than four years. Female life expectancy hit 85.6 years in 2024, according to the Singapore Department of Statistics. On paper, that reads like progress.

Except here’s the thing. Living longer and living well are not the same thing, and the gender bias in healthcare statistics out of Singapore makes that uncomfortably clear. The Ministry of Health estimates that Singapore residents spend roughly a decade of their lives in poor health. And globally, women spend 25% more of their lives in poor health than men, with the average woman clocking roughly nine years managing conditions that quietly chip away at her ability to work, think straight, and feel like herself, according to McKinsey’s Closing the Women’s Health Gap report.

For Singapore specifically, the McKinsey Health Institute puts the collective toll at nearly 40,000 years of healthy life lost annually to unmet healthcare needs. When you break that down individually, each woman loses roughly three and a half days of her life to inadequate healthcare. Which sounds small until you consider what fills those days: symptoms brushed off, diagnoses delayed, and conditions that were always treatable but never quite taken seriously enough.

And here’s the part that really stings. Megan Ann Greenfield, a partner at McKinsey and co-leader of its women’s health programme, flags that over two-thirds of this health gap falls during women’s prime working years. Not quietly, in retirement. Right now, women are building careers, raising families, and running the show. The gap between how long women live and how well they live isn’t some unavoidable biological reality. It’s a design flaw. And design flaws can be fixed.

The shift is happening, and it’s real

After all of that, here is the part where we get to exhale a little. The women who got tired of being dismissed didn’t just get angry. They got organised. Namira Binte Mohamad Marsudi was diagnosed with Stage 4 endometriosis at 28, after years of watching the people around her treat severe period pain as something to quietly endure. Her response? She booked a room and started talking about it. In 2015, five people showed up to her first talk.

Today, E for Endometriosis is a community of over 2,000 volunteers, and the conversation Namira refused to drop has genuinely shifted how Singapore thinks about menstrual health. “There’s a buzz going on about endometriosis, and people are starting to learn what it is,” she says. “But it has to be constant. If we let it die down, people will start forgetting.”

She’s not alone in deciding to fix things from the inside. Dr Eleanor Loh spent a decade bouncing between six different doctors before finally being diagnosed with Stage 4 endometriosis at 26. Her response to ten years of being dismissed? Train to become an endometriosis specialist. Become the doctor she never had. “If they’ve made that step to come and seek help,” she says, “they deserve to be heard and taken seriously.”

The bigger structures are finally moving too, which frankly is long overdue. The Global Centre for Asian Women’s Health at NUS Medicine, launched in 2023, is pushing to fix the research gaps that have kept women sidelined in clinical trials for decades. Singapore’s public hospitals have rolled out the country’s first menopause management guidelines, meaning clinicians now have a proper framework for the conversations women have been trying to start for years.

It’s not fixed, but the women driving the change aren’t slowing down for anyone. The research is finally catching up, and the system, slowly and a little reluctantly, is starting to listen.

The bottom line

For many women, being dismissed in a medical setting feels deeply personal, and it really is. The experiences of Mojisola Erdt, Dr Eleanor Loh, and the countless women comparing notes in online forums at midnight are not coincidences. They are patterns, and patterns can be changed.

Assoc Prof Archuleta offers practical advice for women navigating this landscape: find a GP you genuinely trust, go for regular screenings, and know your family health history. Support groups and online communities, she adds, allow women to share experiences and increase their chances of identifying something early.

Understanding the history of medical misogyny doesn’t just reframe the past, it reframes the present too. And for every woman who has ever left a doctor’s office feeling unheard, that reframing matters more than it might seem. Because being taken seriously? That’s not too much to ask. It’s the bare minimum, and it’s finally being treated that way.