The last 14 days of data surrounding female health have generated cheers and concern from the whole team at LIMINAL. As a community committed to co-invention with and for the individuals we look to support, we know the value of lived experience and the importance of every female voice when exploring solutions for female health.
Why? Every day we see, first hand, how the narrow narrative of ‘how’ this life stage is experienced, ‘when’ and by whom impacts the health of women in our community.
I’ve written before about the special way we seem to learn to manage our wellbeing. From puberty to pregnancy to careers and our menopause transition too, when the systems designed to take care of us let us down, it is the stories of others that have gone before that so often light our path.
I am forever in awe of the way that women generously step up to show their vulnerability, to talk to the taboos, simply to ensure that others don’t suffer or struggle in the way they may have done. It was this rich seam of sisterhood I hadn’t really registered until I needed it that saved me when I was trying to understand my symptoms in perimenopause. And, realising its potential - in shaping the future of how midlife is experienced - that led to the founding of what is LIMINAL today.
I see the results of lived experience in the formulations we make with you too. Small scale studies where good change starts. And yet, despite the urgent need to innovate to create a world where we can all be well, the systems that should be facilitating innovation are stacked against the female voice.
On 8th October, The Guardian published findings from two studies. The first explored the discrimination faced by businesses wanting to focus on female health solutions.
Additional reporting by the paper highlighted the ‘disadvantage’ for femtech businesses of having a female founder:
‘The depressing message is that even when you’re working in an area where 75% of the companies are founded by women, and you’ve developed a product aimed specifically at women, having a woman on your founding team…damages your chance of getting funding’.
In tandem with very real hurdles of innovating for females, as females, I’ve been thinking alot about why narrative research is so often dismissed as somehow lacking the rigour of scaled quantitative studies. Particularly as Friday marked World Menopause Day and - alongside the positive progress I know has been made - a sinking feeling as new data highlighted how far we still have to go to ensure everyone has agency to find the solutions that are right for them.
Narrative research is predicated on what we call ‘lived experience’. Dr Stacy Sims wrote a great post about its value when studying both female health outcomes and females in sport earlier this year:
“This approach was conceptualised by internist and psychiatrist Dr. George Engel in a landmark paper in Science (1977) (...) In it, Engel criticised the reductionist biomedical model of patient care. He believed that it reduced people to disease-based objects and ignored the possibility that the subjective experiences of patients are important for clinical care and research.’
My biggest worry when I consider our hopes for this midlife revolution is that, rather than reframing it as an opportunity, a stepping up point, it becomes seen as ‘a disease’. That we are reduced to our sex hormones at the very point we have the most to offer.
Stories matter. The wisdom we carry in our bones is golden. Keep sharing. And we’ll keep bringing the science. And together, good change will happen.
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