Question: what is it like to work with lady buisness +would it be the same working with men?

Kate Clancy answered on 15 Jun 2011:

What a great question!

The two fields you are referring to — women’s reproductive ecology and men’s reproductive ecology — have very interesting differences and similarities.

The main differences are that in our past, most medical research was done on men, even when what they were studying wasn’t related to being male (so, let’s say the study of stroke, or lung cancer). So most of our modern therapies for most diseases are based on the study of men only. Women have not been so lucky, and even diseases related specifically to being female are understudied.

I don’t know if you have this in the UK, but in the US there are huge marketing campaigns to buy an item that is pink and then the company will donate some profit to breast cancer research. This is mostly a sham: they take your money, you wear or eat something goofy because it’s pink and you think you’re helping, but really only 0.01% of the money is going to research. So there is lots of *awareness* around women’s health these days, but still very little money or research.

However, women see doctors a lot more than men, because all sorts of interesting things happen once a woman becomes reproductively-aged (meaning, she’s had her first period). So they’re the ones seeing the doctors, yet research on them hasn’t been nearly as significant!

The reason I say all this is that, this historical issue where women are less studied has a huge impact on what it’s like to study ladybusiness. Women vary a lot more than men, our hormones change a lot more over time and a lot more cycle to cycle. Yet most doctors seem to think there’s something wrong with you if your hormones don’t hit some perfect “average” value. But in a way, average isn’t normal! So I have to constantly fight against this wrong idea that all women have to be the same, just to get my basic research done.

That said, there are ways in which studying men and women are the same. You probably all know what the pill is, and that girls and women use it for lots of reasons, not just to keep from getting pregnant. There have been many questions over the years about whether it is safe long-term, particularly if you start using the pill in your teens (in fact, I have done some research on this). Now it seems like men are falling victim to this same issue, because suddenly testosterone pills (testosterone is a hormone found in higher quantity in males than females) are being advertised for men! Yet no one knows if that is really healthy long term. So recently I have had some very productive conversations with male reproductive ecologists, because suddenly they are complaining about the same things I always used to complain about!