The British academic offers a devastating diagnosis of the forces that have shaped female healthcare worldwide, along with a powerful prescription for change to remedy the failings, inequalities and injustices
The new Labour government is busy looking for ways to depart from the Conservatives’ legacy. One target may well be the 2022 women’s health strategy for England, an underfunded package of insufficient medical offerings that sidestepped important questions about inclusivity and narrowly constrained women’s health to conditions affecting the uterus, ovaries and breasts. As if women don’t have other body parts that go wrong. It is tempting to see the strategy as a smokescreen for how badly the Tories have let women down: widening gender pay disparities, leaving half a million people stuck on gynaecology waiting lists, prompting fear about maternity failings, burdening women with childcare constraints and excluding them from political decision-making.
In Sick of It, Sophie Harman expertly shows that failings at home are mirrored and magnified across the globe. For all the talk about the importance of women’s health, “no country has broken a trade deal, a special relationship or sanctioned countries” over the wellbeing of women and girls. A professor of international politics specialising in global health, Harman is perfectly placed to explain the forces that shape women’s health, from Kenya and Sierra Leone to Washington and Geneva. Harman highlights the misapprehension that women’s health is a “neutral scientific space free from politics”, where leaders follow the data and deliver what works. Instead, women’s health is often used as mere “diplomatic branding”. Sick of It exposes how women are exploited as recipients of aid and medical treatment, as healthcare workers and unpaid carers, and as female leaders outnumbered by men.