The nurse adjusted my father’s blanket for the third time that hour, her voice soft as velvet. “We just hate to see him suffer like this,” she whispered. My mom and I watched her check his IV with the tenderness reserved for wounded pups.

Three floors down, four years earlier, this same hospital discharged me mid-vomit with a gastric outlet obstruction and a white blood cell count that screamed infection. “Go home and be grateful it’s not a real obstruction,” they said as I doubled over in the hallway.

When my father died, I finally understood what I’d been witnessing my entire life. I saw firsthand that the medical system doesn’t just treat men and women unequally; it operates on a fundamentally different set of assumptions about who deserves to be saved.

The invisible bias that decides who deserves to be saved

For months, my father had been vocal about his readiness to die. He’d spent years ignoring medications, skipping follow-ups, and refusing physical therapy. When diagnosed with diverticulitis in the hospital, he refused a colonoscopy until I begged him to consider it. When his autoimmune condition flared, he wouldn’t ask questions or participate in his recovery.

He hurt everyone around him through his refusal to act, and made it clear he didn’t want to fight for a future with us. It felt like the ultimate betrayal, especially to a disabled person like myself who’d spent years fighting to get treatment, to stay out of the hospital, to get on with life.

“I’m done,” he’d say. “I just want it to be over.”

I realized that he didn’t care. That no amount of talking, believing, or wishing would change it.

But when he finally collapsed and we rushed him to the hospital, the system saw only one thing: a poor, sad man in distress. They didn’t see the years of refusal, the pain he’d caused, or the wreckage he’d left behind.

They saw someone to save.

Every measure imaginable was deployed. Staff checked on him constantly, changed his equipment with care, and spoke in gentle whispers. He was wrapped in warmth, empathy, and unwavering medical attention. Even when his condition was terminal, they kept trying, kept fighting. Only one doctor gently broached the subject of letting go, but the system itself never did. We, his family, knew what he would have wanted.

We asked for it to be over. We said it clearly. But no one was willing to hear us.

The cruel irony became apparent as I recounted my hospitalization from one year ago. When I was hospitalized for a bowel obstruction and a UTI (a real obstruction this time) I still slipped through the cracks, just like before.

The on-call surgeon ordered IV antibiotics, but they were never administered. I spent my entire stay without one of the essential medications I needed, and as a result, suffered through one of the most severe UTIs I’ve had to endure. When the oversight was finally caught, the doctors casually dismissed it, saying the antibiotics probably weren’t necessary after all. My primary care was forced to send in antibiotics after I’d been discharged.

Here was my father, noncompliant, harmful, ready to die, receiving tender, fierce, complete care. And here was I, young, trying to survive, asking for help, walking out the door in pain, untreated.

This isn’t anecdotal. The data is overwhelming. Women are significantly more likely to be misdiagnosed during heart attacks because their symptoms don’t match male-centered textbook descriptions. They wait longer in emergency rooms, receive less pain medication, and are routinely dismissed as hysterical or overly emotional.

A 2022 review published in Biology of Sex Differences confirms that women experience widespread disparities in health care across multiple specialties, ranging from cardiology and neurology to pain management and autoimmune care. These disparities are compounded by implicit bias, underrepresentation in research, and diagnostic systems built around male physiology.

Women with chronic illnesses are often told to reduce stress or “get more sleep” rather than being given real diagnostics or appropriate treatment. This isn’t some one-off issue; it’s a systemic, destructive passion by an industry to destroy half the population.

Women have historically been excluded from clinical trials, especially in pharmacology, meaning dosages, side effects, and drug efficacy are often tested on male bodies and then assumed to apply universally. The result? Medications that work differently, or dangerously, on women, and doctors who are never taught how to recognize those differences.

I could reference numerous articles about how women are receiving subpar care. Still, the end result is that despite knowing these are objective, measurable problems, it feels like nothing has changed. The disparity continues to the devastation of women everywhere.

In 2025, Adriana Smith, a pregnant nurse in Atlanta, entered the hospital in extreme pain. Her symptoms were dismissed. By the time doctors realized the severity of her condition, she was declared brain-dead. But instead of acknowledging their mistake, the system kept her on life support for months to carry out her pregnancy, citing Georgia’s restrictive heartbeat law.

On June 13, her baby was delivered by emergency C-section. Four days later, her ventilator was removed. Adriana was laid to rest on June 28, 2025.

I don’t think I can say it any more clearly than this: If Adriana had been a man, her symptoms would have been addressed immediately. She would still be alive. The system didn’t just fail Adriana. It killed her.

The system operates this way because men are seen as stoic victims. We infantilize their decisions and overcompensate in their treatment, even when they’ve caused harm, even when they don’t want help.

We instinctively feel compassion for an elderly man struggling to rise from a chair, but suspicion when a young woman cries in a hospital bed. We say “poor guy, he didn’t know better” while thinking, “She’s just being dramatic.”

This is exactly what happened with my father and me.

I know most people who read this story will think I’m selfish. They’ll ask, “Isn’t it good that your father received amazing treatment?”

But reading this story and asking that question means they’ve missed the point. He occupied an ICU bed he didn’t even want; women with serious symptoms were being sent home. While he received every intervention despite years of non-compliance, women like me were told our pain wasn’t real.

This isn’t about hating my father. It’s not about wanting men to receive less care. It’s about demanding that women receive equal care.

I’m not angry that my father was treated with dignity. I’m angry that I never was. That women like me still aren’t. And I’m angry that we’re dying because of it.

Everything must change. We need more women in clinical research. We need to address gender bias in how treatments work, how scans are read, and how cases are reviewed. We need to train health care workers to recognize their assumptions about who deserves belief, urgency, and care.

Men need to recognize how easily the system makes space for their weaknesses, and how little space is left for ours.

The medical system isn’t failing men; it’s designed around them. Men present to hospitals in worse conditions because they expect massive interventions when they finally seek care. Women, meanwhile, are kicked out and dismissed, forced into that same desperate position.

Before we rush to help the next man in crisis, let’s stop and ask: Would I extend the same urgency, grace, and belief to a woman in pain?

If not, that’s a bias worth examining, urgently.

If you’ve ever dismissed a woman in pain, or watched it happen and stayed silent, don’t look away now. Start advocating. Demand better care for all of us.

Because my story isn’t just mine, it’s every woman’s story. And women are dying because of it, and even one loss is too many.

So, if you read this and think my story is about hating men, you haven’t been listening.

The author is an anonymous patient advocate.