Ordinary women’s health problems are often ignored in Canberra, according to a new survey. Photo: File.
Imagine you develop crippling abdominal pain and it doesn’t go away – for weeks, or months.
It’s bad enough to stop you sleeping, you struggle to cope at work or school and eating properly becomes hard. It impacts your friendships and family life. You bleed heavily and regularly, often feeling bloated and fatigued.
Now imagine another set of symptoms. You’re waking a dozen times each night, sweating profusely. At unpredictable moments during the day your temperatures skyrockets. Your brain is like mush and perhaps you feel flood tides of anxiety.
But when you go to the doctor, in and out in a standard 15 minute appointment, they’re not sure what’s wrong with you, or how to help.
Perhaps you walk out with a prescription for antidepressants, because your symptoms might be caused by “stress”. Or you’re told to try meditation or breathing exercises, to get fresh air and exercise, to get out more.
In fact, the first set of symptoms describes endometriosis, a chronic condition where endometrial tissue grows over other organs like the ovaries, fallopian tubes, bowel, or bladder. With every menstrual cycle, it thickens, breaks down, and bleeds, causing inflammation, scar tissue, and potential infertility.
It’s painful, it requires abdominal surgery (currently unavailable in Canberra), it recurs – and it’s fairly common.
The second set of symptoms describes menopause, almost unnoticeable for some women, crippling for others.
Neither of these are rare disorders. But according to the 2025 Women’s Health Matters survey, shockingly large numbers of Canberra sufferers say they received little to no meaningful support from their doctors, many of whom did not even recognise the conditions.
50 per cent of women treated for endometriosis said they were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their treatment and numbers were almost identical for polycystic ovary syndrome and persistent pelvic pain – familiar conditions affecting thousands of local women every year.
Just under half the women surveyed said in general, their health concerns were taken only “somewhat seriously” – or not all seriously – by their medical practitioner.
There are all sorts of reasons for this – appointments too short to unpack complex health issues, closed appointment books, low rates of bulk billing and more. But of those who had experienced discrimination in a healthcare setting, 57 per cent felt their gender was a factor.
There are a few bright spots in the findings: most women who had given birth in the past two years were very satisfied with the care they received. Nearly 40 per cent felt confident about helping a friend to access reproductive care, including a termination.
The Women’s Health Matters survey is a regular, representative, professional survey paired closely with the Canberra ABS data about local women’s age, employment status, ethnic background, language and place of birth. 1319 women completed the survey, a substantial representative sample.
This year’s results are, therefore, a reliable indicator that all is not well for Canberra women and their access to effective healthcare.
There’s a lot of attempts to stifle gender conversations these days. A bunch of “what-aboutery” surfaces – what about everyone else, what about “wokeness”, what about no special favours for anyone.
Great – if that was only the case. But as the findings above demonstrate so clearly, that’s not true for women’s access to health care.
It’s also not true for men’s health problems. Treatment resources for men suffering from eating disorders are often lacking, for example, and until fairly recently, men’s particular mental health issues were often ignored.
Men are wrongly presumed to be strong, invulnerable, unlikely to be struggling with complex issues around self image or mental wellbeing. These are also gendered assumptions causing men to suffer.
Here’s another very surprising women’s health fact to conjure with. Anatomy is one of the oldest branches of medical science, dating back to the classic era. You’ve no doubt seen Renaissance paintings of anatomical dissection.
But the female clitoris, an organ with complex networks of nerve endings reaching deep into the pelvic cavity, was not understood or described in any modern medical textbook until 1998. It had been observed as early as the 17th century, but then removed systematically from Freud’s era onwards.
Professor Helen O’Connell AO, who had seen plenty of surgeons take great care not to damage the penis while operating, literally rewrote the textbooks less than 30 years ago.
Ask yourself how there’s any other explanation for that besides an assumption women’s sex organs aren’t of interest?
Inequality needs to be called out. Serious health problems should receive attentive, thoughtful and useful health care. Let’s not pretend that gender doesn’t matter.
Genevieve Jacobs is the CEO of Hands Across Canberra, the ACT’s community foundation.
