Maximilian Attwood: Challenging Medical Misogyny in Endometriosis Research
Maximilian Attwood, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“While working on my dissertation on endometriosis care in the UK a few years ago, I came across a study that genuinely stopped me in my tracks.
It wasn’t focused on women at all – it was about the impact on male partners. And honestly, it says everything about how backwards our research priorities still are.
Women wait nearly nine years for an endometriosis diagnosis, get their pain normalised or dismissed, and are regularly told they’re ‘making a fuss’… yet somehow there’s funding and academic space to explore how men feel about women’s disease experience.
This isn’t about ignoring partners – their experiences matter too – but it raises a bigger question: why is women’s pain still treated as secondary? Why is the burden on women minimised while the system diverts attention elsewhere?
And what’s really striking is how much more relevant this feels now than it did when I first wrote my research. The data coming out in the last few years – on diagnostic delays getting longer, gynaecology waiting lists exploding, and women’s pain being dismissed at even higher rates – shows that the gap hasn’t narrowed. It’s widened The patterns I wrote about academically are now playing out even more visibly across healthcare, policy, and everyday patient experiences.
The more I’ve researched since finishing my MSc, the more obvious it becomes: medical misogyny isn’t theoretical. It’s in what we choose to study, who we believe, who we dismiss, and whose suffering is seen as worth investigating.
If you want to learn more about medical misogyny, that focuses on the effect on Women this book is next on my reading list – The Stitch-Up: How Medical Misogyny Harms Us All, by Emma Sewczak and Dr. Andrzej Harris.
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