- Sex and gender play an important role in affecting a patient’s health, their risk factors, how they experience health care and how health-care professionals provide care. Women, for instance, are more likely to report severe and long-lasting pain but are typically treated less aggressively than men, and doctors often approach women’s pain as psychological or psychosocial and are more likely to refer women to a therapist rather than a pain clinic.
- Data published in 2019 in the U.S.-based journal, Women’s Health Issues, also showed that women with heart attack symptoms were less likely than men to receive aspirin, be resuscitated or transported to the hospital in ambulances using lights and sirens.
- Women also experience depression twice as often as men, yet are more likely to experience barriers when trying to access mental health care.
- Each year, too, heart disease kills more women than men, yet less than half of patients in heart-disease research studies are women; women are also seven times more likely to be misdiagnosed mid-heart attack and sent home from emergency departments compared to men presenting with identical symptoms.
- Since the first cases showed up in Canada, more Canadian women than men have died from COVID-19. Most of the deaths in Canada have been among long-term care residents. And the majority of those residents were women.
- Global News (2020). More Canadian women have COVID-19 and are dying as a result. Here are some possible reasons why. https://globalnews.ca/news/6920505/more-women-have-coronavirus/
- Lewis, J. F., Zeger, S. L., Li, X., Mann, N. C., Newgard, C. D., Haynes, S., … & McCarthy, M. L. (2019). Gender differences in the quality of EMS care nationwide for chest pain and out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Women’s Health Issues, 29(2), 116-124.
- The Globe and Mail. 2019. There’s a health gap in Canada – and women are falling through it – https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-theres-a-health-gap-in-canada-and-women-are-falling-through-it/