What is Gender Medicine?
What is Gender Medicine?
Gender medicine is an emerging branch of human medicine that deals with the biological differences between the sexes and the influence of sex and gender on health, disease, research, treatment and prevention. Both the biological sex and the socio-cultural aspects of gender are of importance. For centuries, the female body was regarded in medicine as a smaller version of the male body - the male body was considered the norm in human medicine. The research results obtained largely on the basis of the male body were transferred to women, whereby the female-specific symptoms of diseases and the different effects of drugs on the female body were ignored. Some diseases were also assigned to a specific gender: for example, heart attacks were seen as a male disease and osteoporosis as a female disease. Many of these ideas still persist today and have far-reaching medical and economic consequences: Diseases are not always diagnosed correctly and therapies are not geared towards the gender-specific needs of patients. This affects not only women but also men. While heart attacks in women, for example, are under-recognized and often treated late, this also happens with men who suffer from osteoporosis. The gender-specific differences between the two diseases mentioned are well known today. In many specialist areas, however, the effects of gender on the course of the disease and treatment have not yet been sufficiently researched. This is where gender medicine research comes in. It aims to shed light on the blind spots in human medicine with regard to gender and thus improve healthcare for all genders. Informative short videos and interviews explaining gender medicine can be found in the following link.
Gender medicine research
Gender medicine is a young and innovative field of research. Various projects exist at all medical universities and university hospitals in Switzerland. Research is broad-based and interdisciplinary and encompasses both basic and clinical research as well as research in the field of public health. In 2023, the Federal Council approved the National Research Program NRP 83 “Gender Medicine and Health” and provided CHF 11 million in research funding. From around 140 research projects submitted in 2024, 19 research projects were selected to start work in 2025. The aim of the NRP is to create an evidence-based knowledge base in Switzerland for the consideration of the dimensions of sex and gender in the fields of health research, medicine and public health. Disease symptoms and courses, as well as the effects of medications, can vary greatly between women and men. Genetic predisposition is partly responsible for this: every single brain, heart, and liver cell, as well as the hormone balance, are different in women and men. The list could go on indefinitely. The symptoms of many diseases, from heart disease to strokes to cancer, manifest themselves differently depending on gender and require differentiated treatment. Gender medicine, as part of personalized medicine, is concerned with exactly what these differences are and how medical professionals should take them into account. Precision medicine is a research focus of University Medicine Zurich. As the first university in Switzerland, the University of Zurich created a Chair of Gender Medicine at the beginning of May 2024 to research gender medicine and integrate it into teaching and practice.
Gender medicine in healthcare
The aim of gender medicine is to incorporate the findings of gender-specific research into medical practice and prevention, thereby improving healthcare for all genders. In concrete terms, this means applying the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases taking gender into account.
Gender medicine in education and training
In recent years, all medical faculties in Switzerland have integrated findings from gender-specific medicine into human medicine training. From 2021-2024, a joint project to integrate sex and gender into human medicine curricula was also realized with the support of swissuniversities. The result is the web platform “Gender Education in Medicine for Switzerland” (GEMS). This platform is used to exchange teaching materials on the topic of sex and gender in human medicine. The teaching materials are generously provided by teachers and researchers from the partner institutions.
In the area of continuing education, there is also a CAS course in gender-specific medicine, which is aimed at people with a Master's degree in medicine or a related field. It covers the basics and tools of how healthcare and medical research can be gender-equitable. The program is offered jointly by the Universities of Bern and Zurich.