Ladies with painful well being situations, resembling endometriosis, are having to “suck it up”, in line with a new report by the Ladies and Equalities Committee. Traditionally, ladies’s ache has been minimised, dismissed, and, let’s face it, completely ignored in medical areas, from an absence of specialized analysis into feminine well being situations to gender stereotypes in GP appointments. It is one thing that Dr Angela Naef, Chief Analysis and Improvement Officer at Reckitt, is set to alter.
Dr Naef, or Angela, is a scientist by commerce and manages a group of 6000 individuals world wide, from researchers in laboratories to medical docs, who’re all working to innovate and ship superior well being and hygiene merchandise for the plenty. One such product is Nurofen.
In 2022, Nurofen commissioned groundbreaking analysis into the gender ache hole, outlined as “a phenomenon through which ache in ladies is extra poorly understood and extra mistreated in comparison with ache in males.”
Earlier this yr, Nurofen launched its third Gender Ache Hole Index Report as a part of the See My Ache marketing campaign. It discovered {that a} larger variety of UK ladies felt like their ache had been dismissed or ignored in 2024 (62%) than in 2023 (49%) and 2022 (56%). In her ahead to the report, Angela writes, “We’re nonetheless a great distance from attaining a stage enjoying subject in terms of ladies’s experiences of ache therapy.”
“We can’t proceed this fashion,” she continues. “Everybody ought to have the identical expertise with ache and may really feel assured that they’ll get a analysis and determination for it, no matter gender.”
Right here, Angela Naef speaks to GLAMOUR about being a lady in STEM, arising towards the “male as default” strategy to healthcare, and revolutionising how we take into consideration ladies’s ache, closing the gender ache hole as soon as and for all…
“My first position mannequin was my mother,” Angela tells me on a cold December afternoon in central London. As a younger lady rising up in California, she remembers how her mom spent many evenings finding out for nursing faculty. Angela recollects pinching one in every of her mom’s books. “I spent hours and hours paging by means of it and tracing issues.” When her mom got here to retrieve the guide, she realised that her ten-year-old daughter had been poring over her microbiology textbook – a positive signal of issues to return.
Quick-forward a decade, Angela is finding out chemistry on the College of California. “There is not any doubt about it: there’s a huge gender imbalance in lots of STEM fields,” she explains, including that chemistry, physics, and arithmetic are sometimes sorely missing in feminine illustration. When she achieved a PhD in bodily chemistry, she was a part of a small graduating class. “There have been different ladies with me, however we have been the minority,” she explains. This wasn’t the final time she skilled a gender imbalance in her profession.
All through Angela’s journey from PhD grad to one of the crucial senior leaders at Reckitt, she has advocated for trustworthy conversations about ladies’s well being – even when she’s been the one girl within the room.
“I’d been round many tables the place I used to be the one girl the place I needed to say, however you all know that ladies have menstrual cycles, proper? Otherwise you all know that ladies have breasts and breasts require completely different PPE?”