elements - I was intending to focus on bleeding as a symptom, but you're right that there are so many other areas in which women's voices are not being properly 'heard'. Endo is one of the worst conditions - I think I read recently that the average time from first presentation to diagnosis is something like NINE YEARS! How is that REMOTELY acceptable?! So perhaps I'm thinking too narrowly and I should broaden it to 'hearing' women on women's issues. With bleeding as a kind of case study.
I think there is something around gynae things specifically where women are just supposed to tough through it. And this is a strange door that swings both ways - on the one hand, it acknowledges the rigours of birth as one of the most extreme physical experiences generally gone through by either sex, promoting a view of the toughness of women and their ability to chug along putting up with things. On the other, it is connected to the very disabling ideas of hysteria as a 'female' disorder promoted by a lot of early psychology, so a view of their weakness, which is also an element in the failure to listen.
(As you can probably tell, I'm in the earliest phases of planning this, so all suggestions welcome. I DO want to limit it to issues that women alone face, though, rather than more general health inequalities, though I recognise tribpot's point that these are severe, and I definitely agree that certain skills that tend to be more middle class are needed to navigate the health system as it stands).
Perhaps more controversially, I also think that there are elements in our own culture as women where we don't help ourselves and I want to tackle this. For example, there is a kind of oneupmanship around health, where one woman will mention something and (often under a pretext of empathy) another woman will chip in with an experience that, on the face of it, is even worse. It's at its most awful with birth, but you also see it with other gynae issues too. I have had this happen more times than I can count when telling my own story, and it has often felt like a kind of negation. Very often, it has been done in a way that unhelpfully tries to pit an acute crisis against a chronic condition, when the two are hardly comparable. (With similar cases, there's also a kind of raw size thing, a 'my fibroid/baby/scarring was bigger than yours'). I feel that it prevents us from 'seeing' each individual case and the patterns between them and instead promotes a kind of attitude of 'What is she complaining about? I had it worse AND I MANAGED'. It deflects attention away from the very real structural problems that women face in navigating healthcare systems, rather than building solidarity and empathy.