Backlash, Endometriosis, and an International Women's Day Lecture
Join me at Edinburgh University on 7th March!
Dear GFPs,
Happy (almost) March! The spring is springing, the birds are chirping and the women they are internationaling — and on that note, to the subject of today’s email, which is to let you know about the International Women’s Day lecture I’m giving next weekend (Saturday 7th March) at the University of Edinburgh. The lecture is free, open to the public, and at the time of writing there were still a few tickets left, so hopefully there will be at the time of sending too…!
2026 is an interesting time to be alive while female and when I say interesting I very much mean it in the probably not ancient and also probably not actually Chinese curse way. The backlash that has been brewing for some years is now in full, unabashed swing, and in the face of reversals in women’s freedoms and horrific stories of abuse seemingly coming at us from all corners of the world, it can feel difficult to know how to keep going, to keep pushing, to keep, even, hoping.
2026 also makes 300 years since the founding of the medical school at Edinburgh University — although it is not 300 years since women were formally admitted. That didn’t happen for nearly another 150 years and even then, the women were admitted with great reluctance, in the face of enormous opposition, and only temporarily. The forces of backlash were great, and, for a time, those forces were victorious.
But women didn’t give up then — and we cannot, shall not, give up now. That, in any case, is the message I hope the audience will be taking away from my speech.
The event is being run in partnership with ENDO1000, a research project I first was connected with a couple of years ago with I wrote this piece about Eleanor Thom, the comedian whose career was derailed by her endometriosis — a chronic and debilitating condition that despite affecting one in ten women remains under-diagnosed, under-treated, under-studied and under-funded.
Invisible Women: childless cat ladies
This is unsurprising: despite affecting 10% of the female population, a 2020 analysis found that endometriosis came close to the bottom of US’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) list of 285 research areas for funding. And it’s not just endometriosis: the same analysis found that NIH funding for reproductive sciences is “disproportionately low,” across the board. Polycistic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), for example, a “complex, multisystem disorder” with a similar prevalence, “did not even make the list.”
Which is where ENDO1000 comes in, an incredibly ambitious research project being run from Edinburgh University’s Centre for Reproductive Health, which aims to collect data from 1000 people over two years, and use it to reduce diagnostic delays and, most importantly, improve treatments for a disease that currently has no cure.
And they’re going to rack up A LOT of data. As well as collecting biological samples (vaginal swabs, saliva, urine, blood and faeces samples), the research team will also be pulling in information from smartwatches about participants’ daily activities, as well as information about their diet. And by pulling it all together and analysing it over time, they hope to be able to spot patterns we haven’t seen before (because no one’s funded anyone to look) and make much-needed medical breakthroughs. It’s extremely exciting and could radically transform how we diagnose and treat endometriosis in the future — and, I think, it’s also a really good use-case for how to use AI in medical research responsibly.
The way we’ve been using AI in medicine to date is to replicate what we’re already doing, in the hope that it can be done more quickly and, above all, more cheaply. And supposedly, more accurately — which is where we run into a big ol’ female-shaped problem, because, of course, AI is only as good as the data we feed it and as readers of this newsletter may remember, we have historically been somewhat unenthusiastic about collecting data in the female half of the world. Which has meant that while AI generally is pretty good at, for example, spotting disease in men, it leaves something to be desired when it comes to spotting disease in women.
But ENDO1000 isn’t simply using AI to replicate what we are already doing; it’s using AI to do things we haven’t been doing, largely because no one wants to fund them (lady diseases are such a snooze fest amirite?). It’s using AI to comb through mountains of data that, sure, we could sort through using mountains of humans, but who is going to fund mountains of humans to study a disease that affects one in ten women? Going by history I’m going to say…no one. It’s a great example of how AI could actually be transformative for health if only we would be more ambitious in how we use it.
If you’d like to support ENDO1000’s work in this month of International Women, you can donate here, and again you can attend my IWD lecture by booking tickets here.
Hope to see some of you there!
Poppy pic of the week
Thank you for connecting us to this endometriosis group. Are you familiar with the work of Linda Griffith who leads the MIT Center for Gynepathology Research and the Fairbairn Menstruation Science Fund? Highly, highly inspirational!