Chapter 8 - Bringing the Processes Together

Summary

Thus far, we have explored connections between power and inequality; good-faith/bad-faith treatment and the benefit of the doubt; moral alchemy; assumptions related to competence, trustworthiness, and innocence; self-fulfilling prophecies; positive and negative in/visibility; and relationships between people and problems. While I’ve provided examples of how these processes work separately, they often combine to make situations of inequality even more troubling or dangerous. In this chapter, I discuss five situations of inequality in which multiple cultural processes work in tandem: women's pain, how we think about sexual assault, antiabortion discourse and laws, race and school discipline, and racial profiling outside of schools.

Women's Pain

Women's pain was mentioned in Chapter 1 as an example of whose comfort matters and whose does not. The discussion of heart attack symptoms in Chapter 6 also noted that women are more likely to die of heart attacks because the “textbook,” “traditional,” and “classic” heart attack symptoms (which involve pain) are universalized despite the fact that they describe male heart attacks rather than all heart attacks. We know that women experience and report more pain than men, but receive less intensive and effective treatment for it. Why?

Journalist Maya Dusenbery points to a knowledge gap and a trust gap as the factors underlying women's challenges in having their pain taken seriously:

First, there is a knowledge gap: the average doctor does not know as much about women's bodies and the health problems that afflict them. It starts at the most basic level of biomedical research, where investigators overwhelmingly use male cells and animals in preclinical studies. And it continues through the clinical research process, where women remain underrepresented, analysis by gender is rare, and women's differing hormonal states and cycles are usually ignored entirely. Meanwhile, conditions that disproportionately affect women have often not been deemed worthy of research funding and time. […] Second, there is a trust gap: women's accounts of their symptoms are too often not believed.

As Dusenbery further observes,

These two problems—the knowledge gap and the trust gap—are mutually reinforcing to such a degree that they’ve become stubbornly difficult to correct. Are women's complaints so often dismissed because doctors simply don't know enough about women's bodies, their symptoms, and the diseases that disproportionately affect them?