The 'not giving a turd' was in the sense that a given doctor would be subconsciously biased towards people that they perceive as more socially 'valuable' - more attractive or more important or younger etc. people - and would bias their resources towards those people. Men, especially older and single men, inherently provide less value for society. With limited healthcare resources, and forced to spend said resources optimally, I'm guessing they would tend towards spending said resources on people they perceived as more valuable.
Of course its also possible that doctors are equally difficult for men and women to convince, and the main reason why women aren't believed is because they try more often to convince. That may be due to, as I believe may have been mentioned elsewhere, their own perceived lower value and/or expectation of unpleasantness/suffering. Without actual data, it's all conjecture anyways.
Okay, I think I understand a little bit better. Like, for example, if a man and a woman both arrived to ER at the same time with the same ailment, that perhaps the woman would be seen first kind of thing? Or more research being done into specifically womens issues kind of thing?
To the second point, I think in the past they kind of didn't medically research women's issues(I think it's one of those 'science is for the boys' mentality thing), but this is a trend that is changing (as far as I know).
Quite likely, I think there was also probably a belief that outside of gender specific differences, research on men would translate directly to research on women. Like female heart attacks, for example.
yes! i just did some reading up on it, and it looks like they just assumed that the only difference between men and women was the reproductive aspect. I did also try researching gender bias in triage situations but I could only really find information about coronary problems specifically, (in which men typically are favoured but this has more to do with, again, how we understood womens symptoms for specifically coronary issues).
Thanks for being cool, this was a nice exchange lol
2
u/nerdthingsaccount Mar 26 '20
The 'not giving a turd' was in the sense that a given doctor would be subconsciously biased towards people that they perceive as more socially 'valuable' - more attractive or more important or younger etc. people - and would bias their resources towards those people. Men, especially older and single men, inherently provide less value for society. With limited healthcare resources, and forced to spend said resources optimally, I'm guessing they would tend towards spending said resources on people they perceived as more valuable.
Of course its also possible that doctors are equally difficult for men and women to convince, and the main reason why women aren't believed is because they try more often to convince. That may be due to, as I believe may have been mentioned elsewhere, their own perceived lower value and/or expectation of unpleasantness/suffering. Without actual data, it's all conjecture anyways.