From Australia to the White House, efforts stepped up to fight gender bias in healthcare system

While it is not just people of colour who are affected by medical misogyny, they have it worse overall, said human rights lawyer Professor George Newhouse.

“If there’s medical misogyny then the intersection of race and gender means that the outcomes are even worse,” Prof Newhouse, who co-founded the National Justice Project, told CNA.

“We see cases of a lot of misidentification. We have Aboriginal women having much lower weight babies than non-indigenous women. We see Aboriginal women with 27 times the rate of diabetes.”

He cited statistics from Victoria and Queensland showing that more than 50 per cent of Aboriginal people believe they will receive a lower standard of health care than non-indigenous people.

Prof Sherwood noted that Aboriginal people view their well-being from a different cultural perspective.

“Our health is holistic. We don’t just want a mainstream approach to our health and well-being, but we do require respectful encounters and culturally safe experiences in the health service, because if you keep on getting bashed up by nurses and doctors, you don’t want to come back,” she explained.