Young Women Go to Doctor for Sexual Health – Men Go to Get Paid for Napping

There is a disparity between the medical procedures that male and female millennials undergo. According to data recently published by the consumer healthcare company Amino, seven of the top ten medical procedures that millennial women have are related to sexual or reproductive health. Comparatively, for men of the same demographic, only two of their top ten fall in these categories.

Dr. Chloe Bird, a senior social scientist at the RAND corporation, informed Broadly via email that "reproductive healthcare has long made up the majority of clinical visits and procedures for younger women in large part because women get pap smears, IUDs, and C-sections, and men do not." (Of course, some transgender men do, though they're often viewed as biologically female by the medical establishment.) According to Dr. Bird, there may be even more women accessing sexual health-related care ever since the Affordable Care Act made IUDs and other once prohibitively expensive forms of contraception available to women of lower economic status.

2016 inherited a gendered conflict decades in the making; today, the bodies of women have become a battleground for a conservative right continually demonstrating that it values the hypothetical life of unborn children more than the liberty of living, breathing women. Men may feel entitled to rule the female body via legislation that restricts women's reproductive health, but clearly it is women who are responsible for their own wellness. Dr. Bird noted, "It is important to keep in mind, that until or unless we have male hormonal or long acting contraception, women will likely continue to have more reproductive health procedures than do men." Though a German carpenter is trying to implant an on/off switch into men's balls, the search for effective male contraception is not yet mainstream.

In an interview with Broadly, Amino medical director Dr. Jorge Caballero explained that the database for his company's latest study was derived from health claims and that it represents "what doctors reported for patient's sex and age." Data about gender identity is clearly missing from that reporting. "This reporting does not capture any aspect of transgender status, " Dr. Caballero said. Though the majority of people are cisgender, there are millions of transgender Americans who are seen by the medical establishment as biologically one sex while they have transitioned to, live as, or identify with another

It's quite possible that there are trans patients in the Amino data, but there's no way of knowing. "Transgender persons and other gender and sexual minorities are generally not well-represented in medical data," Dr. Caballero noted, adding that as his organization moves forward they will be "looking into the nuances of health care practice and utilization in order to better serve specific patient communities."

One thing's certain, as Dr. Bird stated: "Much more work is needed on healthcare utilization by transgender individuals and other sexual minorities."

What we do know is that the top medical procedures for millennial men include "colonoscopy, sleep study, [and] allergy shots." So basically, boys take Benadryl and get paid to nap. The fact that women utilize sexual healthcare so much more than men may be, in part, thanks to society. "The reality is that women are recommended more screening procedures than men at this age," Dr. Caballero explained. "For instance, The US Preventive Services Task Force recommends cervical cancer screening for women beginning at age 21, and screening for chlamydia in sexual active women age 24 year or younger and in older women who are at increased risk for infection. Beyond behavioral counseling, there is no analogous recommendation for young men."