Why Women’s Health Matters to Me (and should to everyone)

Women’s health became personal for me long before I ever wore scrubs, opened a medical textbook, or stepped into a clinic.

One of my earliest experiences with loss was watching my grandmother pass from Cardiovascular disease when I was 11. At the time, I didn’t fully understand the pathophysiology behind it, but I understood the feeling of losing someone you love. I understood helplessness. And years later, as I entered healthcare, I began to understand something even bigger: women’s symptoms, risks, and experiences have historically been under-recognized, under-researched, and too often minimized.

That realization stayed with me.

Over the past two decades in healthcare, I’ve listened to countless women describe feeling unheard, unseen, dismissed, exhausted, or told their symptoms were “just stress,” “just hormones,” or “just part of getting older.” I’ve met women who were surviving, but not thriving. Women who delayed seeking care because they put everyone else first. Women who apologized for taking up space while carrying unimaginable physical and emotional burdens.

And if I’m being honest, I’ve also witnessed moments within healthcare that deeply unsettled me.

I remember hearing an anesthetist say to a little girl before surgery, “You’re pretty brave for a girl.” I remember thinking: Why are we still teaching girls that bravery is surprising?

I remember hearing a surgeon comment that “if women would just cut their calories in midlife, we wouldn’t need to do all these abdominoplasties and liposuctions.” As though menopause, hormonal shifts, metabolic changes, pregnancies, caregiving stress, sleep deprivation, aging, medications, and complex social factors could simply be reduced to personal failure and calorie counting.

And I remember hearing a physician casually dismiss endometriosis by joking to a patient with hypothyroidism, “Oh no… do you have endometriosis too?” As though endometriosis, a painful, life-altering disease affecting millions of women, was somehow trivial or exaggerated instead of deserving serious attention and compassionate care.

Those moments mattered to me because WORDS MATTER.

The way we speak to women matters.
The assumptions we make matter.
The explicit and implicit biases within healthcare matter.

Women’s health is not niche healthcare.
It is not “special interest” medicine.
It is not secondary.

Women’s health affects families, communities, economies, generations, and quality of life across the lifespan.

And yet women continue to face delayed diagnoses, undertreated pain (message me if you want to read my paper on this!), inadequate research representation (1993 before women of childbearing age were involved in research), stigma around reproductive and menopausal health, and healthcare systems that often fail to fully hear them.

That is part of why Women in Momentum exists.

Not because I believe healthcare professionals are bad people, I’ve worked alongside incredible, compassionate providers for years, but because systems and cultures can normalize harmful attitudes without us even realizing it.

I want women to feel safe asking questions.
I want them to feel believed when they describe symptoms.
I want young girls to grow up understanding that being brave is not surprising for a girl.
I want menopause conversations to happen without shame.
I want conditions like endometriosis, PMOS (Goodbye PCOS), cardiovascular disease, chronic pain, and reproductive health concerns taken seriously.

Mostly, I want women to know they deserve care that sees the whole person,  not just the lab result, the body size, the diagnosis, or the stereotype.

Women deserve to thrive.
Not merely survive.

And that is why women’s health matters to me.

-J