The Invisible Woman: How Systemic Bias in Healthcare and Workplaces Harms All of Society
The stark reality of disproportionate infant and maternal mortality rates for Black and brown individuals in the United Kingdom reveals a deeply entrenched systemic issue, rather than a biological one. While statistics indicate that a brown or Black baby is twice as likely to die before its first birthday, and a Black or brown mother faces double the risk of dying in childbirth, the underlying cause is not genetics or economic status. Instead, it points to a fundamental design flaw within systems that historically fail to acknowledge and adequately serve all populations.
A Personal Awakening to Systemic Flaws
The profound impact of this systemic neglect often becomes most apparent through personal experience. Geeta Sidhu-Robb recounted her own challenging journey after becoming pregnant, which led her into what she describes as a "white medical system" as a brown woman. Despite the clinical kindness of healthcare professionals, her concerns and intuitive understanding of her own body and later, her son's condition, were often superseded by medical charts and protocols that did not account for her unique physiology or perspective. This became strikingly evident when her son developed anaphylaxis at five or six months old, leading to a near-fatal event where he stopped breathing in her arms. This traumatic experience, coupled with the observation that other infants in the intensive care unit did not survive, underscored a disturbing pattern of systemic failure.
The Foundation of Exclusion: The White Body Standard
This crisis is not merely a matter of race but a profound design flaw rooted in the historical construction of healthcare. For centuries, medicine has been calibrated around a singular, idealized patient: an English-speaking, economically able-bodied man. This foundational "white body standard" dictates everything from symptom recognition and diagnostic criteria to drug trials and dosage recommendations, inadvertently marginalizing anyone who deviates from this narrow archetype. Consequently, the intricacies of women's biology—including menstruation, pregnancy, postpartum recovery, and perimenopause—are often overlooked or misunderstood within a system not built to measure or protect them. This fundamental oversight means that all women, regardless of their racial background, enter a medical environment that is not inherently calibrated for their bodies, potentially jeopardizing their health outcomes.
The Ripple Effect: Misdiagnosis and Design Gaps
The implications of this male-centric design are widespread and profoundly dangerous. For instance, perimenopause, a natural biological stage affecting half the global population, receives astonishingly little attention in medical training, often relegated to an elective one-to-two-hour module. This lack of comprehensive education contributes to widespread misdiagnosis, with many women being prescribed antidepressants for symptoms that are, in fact, hormonal shifts. Similarly, heart disease, traditionally associated with chest pain, often presents differently in women, starting in the middle of the back and feeling like indigestion, leading to misdiagnosis in 50% of cases. Furthermore, drug dosages have historically been based on male physiology, exemplified by the sedative Ambien being prescribed at double the appropriate dose for women for two decades, resulting in severe consequences like impaired driving. Even seemingly unrelated areas like automotive safety highlight this bias; crash test dummies, developed in 1966, were exclusively male. It was not until 2025 that female crash test dummies were designed in the United States, leaving women 47% more likely to be injured and 17% more likely to die in car accidents than men.
Workplace Design: The "Ideal Worker" Myth
This systemic erasure extends beyond healthcare into the professional realm. Workplaces are often structured around an "ideal worker"—one who is linear, predictable, and uninterrupted, essentially a proxy for a man who does not conceive, get pregnant, breastfeed, or experience perimenopause. Women are implicitly penalized for their biological realities, facing a significant 30% pay gap for "repopulating the world" and often being marginalized or forced out of employment at critical life stages. This framework prioritizes a male model of productivity, failing to recognize and value the unique contributions and life experiences women bring, even though women-led companies demonstrably perform better, being 25% larger than their male-led counterparts.
The Monoculture Trap: Nature's Lesson
Drawing an insightful analogy from farming, Geeta Sidhu-Robb referenced her father, a farmer in Malawi, who taught that planting the same crop repeatedly leads to monoculture, depleting the soil of its nutrients, resilience, and immunity. This natural principle mirrors the flaws in human-designed systems. When healthcare, workplaces, and leadership become monocultures—structured around a single, narrow standard—they inevitably lose their vitality and capacity to thrive. Diversity, in this context, is not merely an aesthetic choice or a matter of political correctness; it is a biological imperative for the survival and flourishing of any species, including humanity. Nature, unlike our current systems, inherently understands and champions the brilliance of variety.
Redesigning for a Thriving Future
Recognizing this critical need, Geeta Sidhu-Robb founded The Womanist Movement, an organization dedicated to redesigning systems based on the fundamental, yet often ignored, truth: women are not small men. Through initiatives like WCorp, which certifies workplaces to embrace women's biology, Green Flag for certifying capital investment in women, and WCorp Allies for promoting allyship, the movement aims to transform environments where women's biology is viewed not as a liability, but as an asset. By allowing women to bring their full selves and experiences to work and life, without hiding biological realities like pregnancy or postpartum changes, societies can unlock immense potential. When women thrive, families, workplaces, and entire societies flourish.
The Imperative of Systemic Change
The question of the "value of a brown baby" transcends individual lives; it probes the future we forgo when certain bodies are deemed inconsequential by our systems. The power to reduce infant mortality and foster a healthier society does not reside solely within hospital walls but within the broader societal structures that support them—workplaces, leadership, and community norms. Our systems dictate who is seen and heard, and until they evolve to truly recognize and honor the existence and diversity of women, particularly women of color as systemic outliers, genuine equality and well-being will remain out of reach. Embracing diversity is not a slogan; it is the essential biological requirement for the survival and flourishing of our species, bringing humanity back to life by honoring the full spectrum of human existence.
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