Part I: The Diagnosis Delay

AI in healthcare could help fix gender bias, but only if we stop training it on the same systems that dismissed women for centuries. Can we do better?

Why Women Still Aren’t Heard—and Why That Might Be About to Change

There’s a moment many women in healthcare settings come to recognize, a moment when the tone shifts. A subtle eye roll. A lingering pause. A gentle, condescending smile. It’s the moment your symptoms become psychosomatic. The pain you’ve described for months is chalked up to anxiety. The racing heart is “probably just stress.” The exhaustion, the brain fog, the inability to function? “You’re a mom, aren’t you?”

For centuries, women’s bodies have been misunderstood, feared, and medicalized in ways that had more to do with control than care. In ancient Greece, Hippocrates claimed that a wandering womb caused hysteria. In the 19th century, the invention of the “rest cure” by Silas Weir Mitchell prescribed bed rest and silence for women with nervous disorders while dismissing their symptoms as emotional weakness or moral failing. Even into the 20th century, clinical trials excluded women altogether, leading to a generation o…