Overlooked, even as psychopaths (and four other stories)

Five reads on gender (in)equality to end your week.

Happy Sunday, dear readers. I am taking part in two women-related events in London this week. On 5th March, I will be in conversation with the Israeli writer and psychologist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, to talk about her work, women’s rights and trauma after 7th October. You can get tickets here. On 10th March, I am chairing a panel of Jewish, Muslim and Arab women to explore how to move forward from the current horrors of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Tickets are suggested donation (i.e pay what you want/can), and you can register here.

P.s. Many thanks to the readers who suggested stories for this week’s edition. You know who you are..!

And now to the reads….

1) An endemetriosis medicine is on the horizon

Endemetriosis — a condition where tissue similar to the lining of the womb grows elsewhere, causing symptoms including heavy periods, severe pain, and difficulty getting pregnant — will affect one in ten women over the course of their lives — or “roughly the same as the proportion of the global population with diabetes,” The Economist reports. Of course, being a disease that only affects women, neither diagnosis (which takes ten years on average) nor treatment are particularly advanced. However, an endemetriosis drug is now closer than it has been in decades. As per The Economist:

Whereas doctors understand why diabetes occurs and how to treat it, their understanding of endometriosis is languishing “30 to 40 years” behind, according to Andrew Horne, a professor of gynaecology and reproductive sciences at the University of Edinburgh and president-elect of the World Endometriosis Society.

….

Things are starting to change, A clinical trial of the first non-hormonal, non-surgical treatment for endometriosis, started in 2023 in Scotland, is showing promising results.

Why do we still know so little about endemetriosis?

“There is still an issue—and I hate to say it—with issues that only affect women,” Dr Horne says. That observation is borne out elsewhere. A report released last month by McKinsey, a consultancy, concluded that “systematic lack of disease understanding” led to a loss of 40m-45m disability-adjusted life years for women annually, amounting to four lost days of “healthy life” per year per woman worldwide.

2) “You are dead or you are raped”

In the just over two years since Russia invaded Ukraine there have been widespread reports of rape and sexual violence by Russian soldiers. For the i, Lauren Crosby Medlicott spoke to Anna Orel, who works for an organisation in Ukraine that supports survivors of sexual violence. Orel said that “growing numbers of Ukrainian women” are beginning “to reveal the horrifying sexual assaults they say have been carried out against them”:

“Statistics from our office of the general prosecutor of Ukraine documented 270 cases of conflict-related sexual violence,” [Orel][ said. “But the real number is more.”

….

Ms Orel said women subject to these attacks have “no choice”.

“You are dead or you are raped,” she said, with attacks sometimes carried out in plain view of children.

3) “I forgot that you existed”

Across academia, women researchers tend to get referenced less than men. In psychology, Kim Elsesser writes in Forbes, papers with women as first or last author receive “30% fewer citations than those with men as first or last authors”, despite women “representing two-thirds of psychology faculty members” (she doesn’t say whether that’s a global figure, I’m assuming she means in the US). Researchers looking into the gender citations gap in psychology have found a possible explanation for this: men remember their male peers’ work more easily. Their study is rather poetically titled “I Forgot That You Existed: Role of Memory Accessibility in the Gender Citation Gap”. Here’s a snippet:

In the study, the researchers asked psychology professors at top-tier research universities to list up to five experts in their area of study. Overall, female researchers were listed less frequently than male researchers.

Further analyses revealed who was most likely to recall male experts versus female experts in their lists. “The underrepresentation of women researchers was entirely driven by men,” the researchers write. In other words, women recalled male and female colleagues at the same rate, but men predominantly listed other men.

4) Overlooked, even as psychopaths

Much has been written about how the world is organised around a male default, with female variations neglected (in fact,

Caroline Criado Perez

, wrote the book about this, Invisible Women). It turns out that this oversight extends to diagnosing psychopaths. As Nicola Davis writes in The Guardian:

“The behaviour of female psychopaths seems to be subtle enough and less obvious than male psychopaths and therefore they’re not recognised as much,” [Dr Clive Boddy, from Anglia Ruskin University, who is an expert on psychopaths in the corporate world] said.

“A small but mounting body of evidence describes female psychopaths as prone to expressing violence verbally rather than physically, with the violence being of a relational and emotional nature, more subtle and less obvious than that expressed by male psychopaths,” he noted, adding that may include spreading rumours and lies for personal advantage.

5) How to tackle misogynist influencers

With the UK limping towards an election, the Labour Party has announced policy to address the impact of misogynist influencers on young people. The plan is to train male influencers as a counterbalance to the likes of Andrew Tate. Bursting the manosphere seems a sisyphean task (Tate alone has 8.8 million followers on X/Twitter), but it’s good to see some constructive thinking on this.

P.s. Also, in The Guardian, Clea Skopeleti speaks to young men and women about the extreme misogyny they encounter online.

Bonus: Hannah Barnes meets Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls | Reproductive justice in Mexico | The Pope vs. “gender ideology” | Incel sentenced in Ohio for planning mass shooting of women

Thank you for reading. See you next time.