By Ellie Glew, Senior Strategist, Inizio Evoke Europe
The year is 2025 and women around the world continue to face substandard healthcare. Not because of complex medical challenges, but simply because of their gender. While it may seem like progress is being made, our new report on bias in healthcare reveals a stark truth: gender bias remains deeply ingrained in healthcare, with significant disparities in how male and female patients are treated. The reality is clear - there’s still a long way to go to achieve true equity in healthcare.
Our research conducted in collaboration with the Brain Sciences unit at University College London (UCL) outlines instances where HCPs have misdiagnosed women and treated male and female patients differently, putting lives at risk. Published in our report, ‘Transforming Bias in Healthcare’, findings show the tangible and quantifiable impact of gender bias on patient outcomes.
We found that risk factors for cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are often overlooked in women, particularly by male HCPs. As a result, women are subject to fewer diagnostic tests and referrals to cardiologists, as well as less frequent hospitalisation. Alarmingly, even when hospitalised, women are less likely to receive coronary interventions than men.[1]
In diabetes care, PCPs often expect women to be more communicative, a bias that can cloud their confidence in diagnosing the condition accurately. [2]
Meanwhile, women are likely to be underdiagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a disease with a devastating prognosis. Only 10 per cent of female patients receive an initial diagnosis of IPF, despite having the condition, because it’s widely considered to be more common in males.[3]
The challenge? HCPs, like everyone else, carry unconscious gender biases. These implicit biases heavily influence their decisions, especially when gender plays a key role in patient care. It's time to confront them.
As a pharmaceutical industry, we need to ignite change and at Inizio Evoke, we are tackling bias in healthcare head on. We have designed behaviour change strategies that go beyond knowledge and awareness. We can do this by helping our clients to identify and influence key biases in their specific therapy areas with our proprietary behaviour change driven and data-backed omnichannel approach. As part of this, we conduct a behavioural diagnosis and in-depth bias identification to ensure that no patients are left behind.
There’s always more that can be done to challenge and address biases. We also work with clients to uncover potential biases across customer journeys and identify approaches to tackle these biases, updating existing content as we go, as well as creating new content where gaps are discovered.
It’s our mission to directly address biases that impact women and people with a cervix. Because everyone should have equal access to healthcare.
Want to know more about healthcare bias - the invisible pandemic? We also studied other biases, such as age bias and race and ethnicity bias, across a range of therapy areas. Read the results and find out how we can create meaningful change for patients around the world.
[1] Hamid A, et al. Cureus. 2024;16(2): e54264.
[2] Skvortsova A, et al. Diab Med. 2023;00:E15087.
[3] Assayag D, et al. Thorax. 2020;75:407–412.