The Pain Gap

"The Pain Gap: How Sexism and Racism in Healthcare Kill Women" is Anushay Hossain's 2021 nonfiction examination of the systemic failures that make American medicine deadlier for women — and especially for Black, Indigenous, and other women of color. Hossain, a feminist policy analyst and CNN commentator, weaves her own near-fatal childbirth experience together with research, interviews, and historical context covering everything from the founding fathers of American gynecology to the modern maternal mortality crisis.

The book documents a measurable gap: women's pain reports are taken less seriously, women wait longer in emergency rooms, women are underdiagnosed for heart attacks, autoimmune disease, and endometriosis, and Black women in the United States die in childbirth at roughly three times the rate of white women. Hossain ties the data to the history — including the experiments of J. Marion Sims on enslaved women — and to present-day insurance, training, and research-funding decisions.

The audience is general readers, healthcare workers, policy advocates, and anyone navigating the medical system for themselves or a loved one. It pairs naturally with Caroline Criado Perez's "Invisible Women," Maya Dusenbery's "Doing Harm," and Linda Villarosa's "Under the Skin."

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