Who Do We Have in Mind When We Say “Human”?

On women’s health, knowledge, and attention

Imagine a pregnant woman in Ghana who is to receive health information on her mobile phone. At first, the information is sent as text messages. But some of the women cannot read. The messages are therefore recorded so that they can listen to them. Then it turns out that the phone is often controlled by the man in the household. The information must be sent at a time when the woman actually has access to it.

Even then, the task is not complete. She may have heard the advice to give birth at a health facility, understood it, and wanted to follow it, yet lack the money, support, or authority to go there.

This scene brings together challenges Melinda French Gates described in a health project in Ghana in Science in 2014. It is not an account of one particular woman. I return to it because, in its special issue of 1 October 2026, Science turns its attention to women’s health throughout life. Between sound advice and the possibility of following it lies the reality of a person’s life.

The Body Taken for Granted

The introduction to the special issue describes a long history in which medical studies largely relied on male participants. Their findings were assumed to apply to women as well. Meanwhile, women’s health was commonly addressed in connection with reproduction and childbirth.

The man represents the human being; the woman represents the mother. Both are reduced: the male body becomes the yardstick for others, while the female body is understood through one of its possible functions.

The editors explain why this starting point is inadequate. Biological differences related to sex matter for illness and health throughout life, including conditions unrelated to reproduction. Hormones, sex chromosomes, and the immune system interact in ways about which we still have much to learn. Nor does the significance of the ovaries end with the reproductive years.

For me, this opens up a hermeneutic question: Who do we already have in mind when we begin to study the human being?

For Hans-Georg Gadamer, understanding always begins somewhere. We encounter the world with experiences, concepts, and expectations that bring some things into view and leave others in the background. This prior understanding is a condition of understanding itself. But it must remain open to being challenged by what we encounter.

Applied to medical research, this means that taking the male body as the norm can amount to more than a bias in the sample. It can form part of a horizon that shapes which differences researchers expect to find, which symptoms count as typical, and which experiences appear as deviations. What never becomes a question receives no answer.

Research needs boundaries. But if we forget who was included and who was missing, knowledge about some can be presented as knowledge about everyone. Broadening the horizon therefore also requires us to examine what we have so far taken for granted.

In the same issue, Jay Bhattacharya, identified as director of the US National Institutes of Health, writes about the importance of independently verifying scientific findings. A promising result needs further examination before we know how far it extends. He is writing about research in general. My reading in the light of women’s health is this: Does the finding also hold when women are studied, and when different stages of life are considered? If the answer changes, we have learned something about the limits of our earlier knowledge. Verification can thus also become an exercise in discovering whom we have overlooked.

In Norway, Too

This also concerns Norway. In its 2023 report, The Big Difference, the Norwegian Women’s Health Committee described a field in which women’s health has low status, services are inadequately coordinated, knowledge does not sufficiently reach clinical practice, and women’s voices carry too little weight.

The report also referred to a review by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health: systematic reviews of treatments for diseases in women revealed substantial gaps in knowledge concerning younger and older age groups. The emphasis was on women of reproductive age. The review covered the research literature, rather than Norwegian studies alone, but informed the assessment of the evidence available to Norwegian health services.

Important research on women’s health is being carried out in Norway. The government’s women’s health strategy of 2024 follows up the report, and in 2026 the Research Council of Norway issued a targeted call for research funding, with particular emphasis on menopausal symptoms. Yet for a Norwegian woman going through menopause, too, the question must be followed all the way through: Does this knowledge become useful when she sits with her general practitioner, trying to explain how her everyday life has changed?

Who Gets to Ask the Questions?

A study published in Science in 2021 examined US biomedical patent applications filed between 1976 and 2010. The researchers found that teams consisting entirely of women were 35 per cent more likely than teams consisting entirely of men to produce patents focused on women’s health.

This is a relative difference, and the finding concerns the focus of the patents. It does not in itself tell us which inventions subsequently led to better treatment. Yet it makes something visible: who participates in developing knowledge and technology can influence which needs are recognised.

This does not mean that women can only conduct research on women, or that men cannot understand women’s health. But experience can draw our attention to something others pass by. A question must first emerge as important before anyone can begin to answer it.

The study also points to a structural imbalance: women participate in patenting far less often than men. The researchers suggest that this underrepresentation may have contributed to inventions addressing women’s health never being developed. These are US data, but the question reaches further: Which needs remain undiscovered when some experiences are rarely present where research ideas receive support and become technology?

Here, the patent study meets the hermeneutic question. Participation is also about who can make a previously overlooked need visible.

Having a Service and Being Able to Use It

The woman in Ghana reminds us of another aspect of the matter. Even the best knowledge must find its way into the life of the person who needs it.

With my background as a social worker and therapist, I pause at the distance between a service being offered and the possibility of using it. Think of a mother offered counselling at ten o’clock on a weekday. She wants help, but cannot leave work without losing pay, and has no one to look after her child. When she does not attend, her absence may be recorded. The conditions that would have made attendance possible are easier to overlook.

This is an imagined example, but it illustrates a question that social work must keep open: What does the help require of the person who is to receive it? An appointment can be available in the service’s calendar and inaccessible in a person’s everyday life.

Biological differences and social power relations require different questions. Hormonal changes may contribute to health difficulties. A lack of control over money may prevent a woman from seeking help for those same difficulties. In her life, these circumstances can interact.

Listening to the woman therefore becomes part of the work of knowing. She can tell us what our categories fail to capture, and why an intervention that looks sound from the outside does not work where she lives. Drawing on Buber, we can ask whether she becomes merely an “It” to be described and recorded, or also a “Thou” whose words we allow to reach us. Assessments and categories are necessary. But in the conversation, her answers must be allowed to change our understanding of what the help should be.

A Whole Life

There is also an ethical challenge in the reasons given for investing in women’s health. Better health and greater independence for women can benefit children, families, and society. That is valuable. But a woman’s right to care cannot depend on how useful she is to others.

Kant’s principle of treating the human being always also as an end in themselves, never merely as a means, sharpens this point. A woman deserves to be taken seriously even when better health produces no measurable benefit for her family, workplace, or society.

She should be able to receive help when young and when old, with or without children, when working and when she can no longer work. Her pain and vulnerability matter because the life is hers.

The special issue’s emphasis on the entire lifespan therefore offers an opportunity to broaden our view. A woman lives before, during, and after the years in which she may have children. She must be present in the questions research asks throughout all those years.

I return to the phone in Ghana. The researchers and aid workers had to discover, step by step, what they had initially overlooked: literacy, access to the phone, and the possibility of acting on the advice.

Who does the knowledge reach?

References

Bhattacharya, J. (2026). Verification makes discovery matter. Science, 394(6819), 7. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aem6125

Buber, M. (1923). Ich und Du. Insel-Verlag.

Forskningsrådet. (2026). Forskning på kvinners helse [Research on women’s health; funding call]. https://www.forskningsradet.no/utlysninger/2026/forskning-kvinners-helse/

Gadamer, H.-G. (1960). Wahrheit und Methode. J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck).

Gates, M. F. (2014). Putting women and girls at the center of development. Science, 345(6202), 1273–1275. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1258882

Helse- og omsorgsdepartementet. (2023). Den store forskjellen: Om kvinners helse og betydningen av kjønn for helse [The big difference: On women’s health and the significance of sex and gender for health] (NOU 2023: 5). https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/nou-2023-5/id2964854/

Helse- og omsorgsdepartementet. (2024). Regjeringens kvinnehelsestrategi – betydningen av kjønn for helse [The government’s women’s health strategy: The significance of sex and gender for health]. https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/regjeringens-kvinnehelsestrategi-betydningen-av-kjonn-for-helse/id3056099/

Kant, I. (1785). Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. Johann Friedrich Hartknoch. Formula of Humanity: Academy edition, 4:429.

Koning, R., Samila, S., & Ferguson, J.-P. (2021). Who do we invent for? Patents by women focus more on women’s health, but few women get to invent. Science, 372(6548), 1345–1348. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aba6990

Nusinovich, Y., Vignieri, S., Ross, S., & Osório, J. (2026). A lifelong focus on women’s health. Science, 394(6819), 42–43. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aem4087