Sexism In The Workplace Essay

While the gender wage gap has become increasingly prevalent in social and political discussions and is finally being acknowledged, an even more threatening, but rarely discussed topic is emerging regarding a gender pain gap that exists as well. Sexism in the workplace is one thing, but sexism when it comes to our health, our urgent care? This could be the difference between life and death. Women who present signs of pain are likely to receive less treatment, wait longer for doctors, and are generally treated as second-class citizens. Race and poverty also feed into bias in healthcare, but there is

They are also consistently given less time than male patients from hospital staff due to men’s complaints being seen as more important. A reason for this may be that doctors wrongly perceive women as being more irrational or emotional than men, and therefore dismiss their complaints over pain as being ‘all in the mind.’ Clinical studies have also found that doctors are more likely to think a woman’s pain is caused by emotional issues rather than physical causes, even in the presence of clinical tests which clearly validate their pain as being real and in many cases even go so far as to sedate the female patient rather than treat her pain. This may also connect on how society feels uncomfortable with ‘emotional’ women and will actively seek to calm their loud or chaotic behavior through sedation, above actually addressing the cause of their distress. By way of contrast, a 2011 report on chronic pain from the Institute of Medicine found that women were more likely to suffer from pain than men and had an overall higher tolerance for it. Regardless, in all cases, their pain was more likely to be minimized by health professionals. And when questioned by the National Pain Report, out of a sample population of 2,400 female chronic pain sufferers, 90% of them reported feelings of gender discrimination by their health care