On the basis of sex and gender in healthcare

Abstract

Sex and gender equality matters for health. Biological sex and gender constructs are major disease modifiers and exist across leading causes of death and morbidity globally. Greater awareness of how sex and gender impact main diseases may lead to new insights into how improvements in prevention, early diagnosis, treatment, and survival can be made. Future research should focus on improving outcomes for women, including a large proportion of women in trials and exploring different approaches in men and women. Governments and institutions must understand that there are strong ethical arguments supporting sex and gender equality in medicine. This review explores how sex and gender determine morbidity, mortality, access to healthcare, help-seeking behaviors, treatment response, and different clinicians’ behaviors that could drive to unequal diagnosis and treatment according to sex/gender.

Keywords

• Gender. Sex. Bias. Healthcare.