Women Are Half the Country (Fund Us Like It)

May is Women's Health Month, which sounds celebratory... until you look at the numbers underneath it.

Seven to ten years. That's the average time it takes to get an endometriosis diagnosis. Not because endometriosis is rare — it affects roughly one in ten women — but because for decades, medicine wasn't actually built with women in mind. Women were excluded from clinical trials to "protect" potential pregnancies, which meant dosing guidelines, treatment protocols, and diagnostic criteria were built almost entirely on male bodies. We were, as Binto's founders put it, "treated as small men, or not treated at all." 

So many of us have lived this. We've sat in offices describing symptoms that were waved away. We've watched loved ones spend years fighting for diagnoses they deserved on day one. I have an autoimmune disease — women are up to four times more likely than men to develop one — and I can tell you firsthand that 'apparently we just didn't study that enough' is not a satisfying explanation.

This month, Rescripted is partnering with Binto to do something about it: a petition calling on the NIH and Congress to mandate proportional research funding for conditions that primarily affect women. It takes thirty seconds. The problem took decades to create.