Like many areas of medicine women aren't listened to. It's like as soon as you past through the hospital doors you are "hysterical", "emotional" be that in respect of your own care or your child. You would hope with increasing numbers of women in medicine, and also how female dominated midwifery, this issue would be improving, but sadly it seems if anything to be getting worse.
They go through the same misogynistic medical training and are inducted into the same misogynistic culture.
Medical training is still predominantly based on male medical science - research into male bodies, drug testing on male subjects, surgery outcomes for male patients. Viewing women as atypical men - which means drugs aren't appropriate for them, their biology is not properly understood, and worst of all their symptoms and presentations are not understood and are therefore missed or mistreated.
Typical female heart attack symptoms are totally different to male symptoms. Yet they are not taught, and when they are they are taught as "atypical symptoms" so HCPs are still not aware that a female patient needs a different approach from the beginning.
This applies to many conditions and many treatments.
For instance, female patients with IBD consenting to surgery to remove their rectum without being informed that the surgery would cause their vaginal wall to collapse as it would no longer be supported. And all the problems that then follow. Including with conceiving.
Why were they denied the opportunity to give informed consent to irreversible surgery that was going to cause life-changing consequences for them as women?
Because their surgeons were completely clueless about how the surgery they performed affected women. Because they had never been taught it.
Because women's bodies and women's outcomes are not studied or considered. The research and evidence and medical texts are all based on male bodies and male outcomes, with the assumption that it can be applied without adaptation to atypical men women.
Same as children used to be viewed as miniature adults by the medical profession and were treated the same as adults without any specific knowledge of or research. Then we wised up. We have yet to learn the same lesson about women's medical needs.
Every time you access medical care as a woman you are treated as an atypical man. Best case scenario you receive poor or ineffectual care, worst case scenario you die.