Pregnant and unwell, Heidi was made to feel like an 'inconvenience'

Heidi* was pregnant with her second child, extremely nauseous and struggling with "unusual" skin symptoms when she sought medical help at an urgent care clinic.

Instead of relief, she was made to feel like an "inconvenience" by a male doctor and told that what she was experiencing was normal for pregnancy.

"He sort of had a little bit of an attitude from the moment he came and got me,"

she said.

Heidi said he was not gentle when he examined her, and she nearly "leapt out of [her] skin".

Heidi left with a script and the belief that she was experiencing a common pregnancy symptom.

"It just made it sound like … it didn't necessitate me being at urgent care," she said.

"After I left, I wished I had told him I really did try and get in with my GP; I didn't want to be there.

"It was just very like, 'Get this woman in and out, [she's] just being a bit dramatic and wasting resources.'"

Heidi was still really struggling with those symptoms by the time she saw her obstetrician, but she had resigned herself to the fact that they were normal for pregnancy.

Her obstetrician informed her that not only had she been misdiagnosed, but she also had a staph infection, and what the doctor had prescribed for her had made things worse.

"It just makes me really angry, to be honest," she said.

"I do think it's a direct reflection on our culture as a whole and treatment towards women … whether it's female medical issues or pregnancy."

Doctor hears 'horror' stories from female patients

Women's health experts say Australia has come a long way when it comes to women's healthcare, particularly in recent years, but medical misogyny is still very much alive.

Dr Natasha Vavrek runs the Bubble, a specialist women's health clinic based in Tasmania.

She's heard a lot of horror stories over the years.

"I've had one woman tell me that after her 13th miscarriage she was told, 'don't worry, you're in your 20s, you will be fine'," she said.

"I've had women told, 'You're too young to go through perimenopause', even though they're in their mid to late 40s or early 50s even, I've had women tell me that the haemorrhaging they've been experiencing of their periods … that's normal.

"I've had women who have come and sat down in that chair and just burst into tears because they just feel so relieved because they know they're going to be heard and listened to."

Dr Vavrek says it's not just about the way women are treated; Medicare also has a gender bias.

She believes one of the biggest barriers for women is the additional cost for longer consultations, which results in a lower refunded Medicare rebate.

"Unfortunately, short medical consults are prioritised and … for the majority of women, their consults need to be longer because of the nature of women's health concerns and problems," she said.

"We need to see that … the money that women are getting back reflects the chronic nature of their conditions, but also the length of time that their doctors usually need to do a really good job of looking after them."

Obstetrician Kirsten Connan sees a lot of the medical misogyny that's embedded within the health system.

"Just one of the many, I guess, discrepancies or gender biases that we still see in medicine, as a really overt example, is the Medicare rebate that we get as women for a pelvic ultrasound in comparison to a male scrotal ultrasound.

"So, the rebate is higher for a male's scrotal ultrasound, which often takes less time to perform, but also, whilst it might be complex, is often less complex than a female pelvis."

The federal government has increased funding for women's health in recent years; it also has the first majority female cabinet at the federal level.

The $792.9 million women's healthcare package announced last year has seen the first contraceptives added to the PBS in three decades, with menopause treatments and endometriosis medication added for the first time in 20 years.

It includes bulk-billing specialist centres in each state and territory for long-acting reversible contraceptives, pelvic pain clinics and a review of gender bias in the Medicare Rebate System.

Focus on equality in medical research

But those kinds of changes can only go so far when medical research continues to be weighted towards men.

Women were only included in medical research studies in Australia from the 1990s, and even today, they represent only around 30 to 40 per cent of participants.

It wasn't until 2026 that Australia made it a requirement for applicants who want funding from a federal grant program to consider sex, gender, variations of sex characteristics and sexual orientation in their research.

Women's health specialist Dr Hannah Chapman said that, because of that, there were still inequities in care between men and women.

"We've got that kind of long history of medical misogyny where all of the research has been conducted on men and just extrapolated to apply to women,"

she said.

"In the same way that children are not little adults, women are not necessarily going to respond to everything in the same way that men do. So that's a really big issue."

It's an issue the federal Assistant Minister for Health and Women, Rebecca White, is aware of.

She said, "Women aren't just little men", and the consequences of treating them like that have been profound for some women.

"We have seen women hospitalised for over-medication across the world," she said.

"We've also seen delayed diagnosis and treatment because women's symptoms present differently from men's, and so that often means that they are not provided with the timely care they desire, need, and deserve.

"And in some cases, that can lead to some serious adverse outcomes, including death."

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for Australian women, but Ms White said it's "still generally viewed as a disease of men".

"A lot of women don't recognise the symptoms of cardiovascular disease, and that is because it's still built on a male model," she said.

"So when they're presenting for care, it can often be dismissed. Sometimes they're just told to take some pain relief, but they could actually be having a heart attack."

Ms White has established national women's health expert panels, and the first one is looking at cardiovascular health.

She says overturning inequity is a big task and won't happen overnight, particularly when doctors trained today are still learning from a biased model.

"We're making decisions because a lot of health professionals going through medical training are still learning things based on a male model of healthcare," Ms White said.

"So we have to really start at the beginning and recreate a system that has equity built at the centre of it."