Girls with painful well being circumstances, equivalent to endometriosis, are having to “suck it up”, in response to a new report by the Girls and Equalities Committee. Traditionally, ladies’s ache has been minimised, dismissed, and, let’s face it, completely ignored in medical areas, from a scarcity of specialized analysis into feminine well being circumstances to gender stereotypes in GP appointments. It is one thing that Dr Angela Naef, Chief Analysis and Improvement Officer at Reckitt, is decided to alter.
Dr Naef, or Angela, is a scientist by commerce and manages a crew of 6000 individuals around the globe, 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 wherein ache in ladies is extra poorly understood and extra mistreated in comparison with ache in males.”
Earlier this 12 months, 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 good distance from attaining a degree enjoying area with regards to ladies’s experiences of ache therapy.”
“We can’t proceed this manner,” she continues. “Everybody ought to have the identical expertise with ache and may really feel assured that they may get a prognosis 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” method 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 function 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 college. Angela remembers pinching considered one of her mom’s books. “I spent hours and hours paging via 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 come back.
Quick-forward a decade, Angela is finding out chemistry on the College of California. “There isn’t any doubt about it: there’s a large 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 senior leaders at Reckitt, she has advocated for sincere conversations about ladies’s well being – even when she’s been the one lady within the room.
“I’d been round many tables the place I used to be the one lady 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 totally different PPE?”