Riddle me this - iron levels to give blood M vs F

[Rippeditoff]

Women need to have 125 as a minimum to give blood

Men need to have 135 as a minimum to give blood

But we (women) lose blood every month. Therefore our iron needs should be higher, so why is our set minimum below men’s?

You could argue we’re “smaller” than men but I’m not sure that holds true across the board.

So we lose more blood than men, but we can donate even if our iron levels are lower than theirs

This has been driving me mad trying to work this out. I just scraped through with a 128 and I asked him how often people get turned away and he said not many but a few and they’re always women never men!

I think it's generally accepted that women will have lower levels (uninformed guess) and just get on with it.

More informed: lots of mental health questionnaires for children (SDQ and RCADS are the main ones I'm aware of) have higher thresholds for girls to count as clinically significant, because girls generally report higher levels of emotional problems than boys. (Why on earth we just accept this rather than looking at how we can make life less shit for girls I'm not entirely sure).

As above, a normal iron level for women is lower than for men. It doesn’t mean women are deficient. They’re just different, so they aren’t setting the standard unrealistically high and same as for men to account for that biological difference.

Men have higher iron levels than women (especially women of menstruating age) hence the higher haemoglobin requirement for men donating blood.

Men can however donate again after 12 weeks, women is 16 weeks.

The parameters are also different for diagnosing things like anemia. So a man would be considered anemic with haemoglobin levels lower the 130, women 120 (and pregnant women are 110)

Sorry to make it clear my anemic numbers are examples, not the medically exact figures!!!

I’ve been turned away twice.