About this item
What happens when you're expected to be healthy, building relationships, and starting your career but are faced with a life-altering medical condition?When we meet a young woman with a serious illness, we tend to label her an outlier. But while we might think of young female patients as anomalies, they are, statistically, the primary demographic for many major illnesses. And they are also one of the most overlooked populations in our health-care system - a system that not only ignores young women to begin with, but women of color and trans women even more severely.Research shows that doctors are more familiar with the way symptoms manifest in men and often fail to recognize equally dangerous ones in their female patients. Women are told they "look fine" and are overreacting to symptoms. They may also have doctors who talk down to them or even sexually harass them. In their personal lives, many women scramble to hide their symptoms and scars to avoid making their friends, partners, and coworkers uncomfortable. Health issues and disabilities further amplify what women already face regularly: warped beauty standards, workplace sexism, and mistrust of their own bodies.Weaving together interviews with young women who have experienced severe illnesses, insights from scientists on the study of gender and illness, and her own harrowing story of coming of age with serious medical issues, Michele Lent Hirsch exposes just how much our gender norms hurt women who are already hurting, and how sexism prevails both in relationships and at the doctor's office.
About the Author
Michele Lent Hirsch is a writer and editor who specializes in science, gender, and health. Her nonfiction has appeared in or on the Atlantic, the Guardian, Smithsonian, Psychology Today, and Consumer Reports, among other outlets, and her poetry in the Bellevue Literary Review and Rattle. She has taught journalism at Manhattanville College, conducted research as a writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A native New Yorker, she is also a member of Columbia University's Neuwrite network, a selective group of writers and scientists. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.Author photo: Willy Somma
