In the weeks since the allegations against a Melbourne gynaecologist became national news, I have watched women across Victoria and the country express distress, anguish, shock, and rage. Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan said she was “sickened” by the allegations, while Health Minister Mary-Anne Thomas said she was “addressing” the allegations. I believe them when they say that the Government is taking women’s concerns seriously.
As women, we see first-hand how we have poorer health outcomes when we are failed through the undervaluing and disbelief of our pain. When our pain is dismissed, when diagnoses are delayed or incorrect and when we receive inadequate or no treatment, we are failed.
The Bridging the Gender Pain Gap Report – Victoria’s landmark 2024 inquiry into women’s pain, which was the first of its kind in Australia – laid this out with uncomfortable clarity. Nearly 13,000 women and girls spoke with fierce courage about gender health gaps, experiences of medical bias, sexism, and feelings of being ignored. The Report was also unflinching when it talked about “a health system built around Caucasian male biology.”
But for us women with disabilities, sexism is not the only system we must fight. Ableism is there too. Ableism in healthcare is not only about attitudes, but how structures, systems and clinical practices are designed. This includes how symptoms are interpreted, whose pain is taken seriously, and whether further investigation is even pursued. So, when sexism and ableism combine, something particularly harmful occurs. A confluence if you wish. This confluence is what happens when the health system’s disbelief of women meets its disregard for disability.
This confluence is the experience of walking into a medical professional’s office and knowing that two separate systems may be working against you. One tells the medical professional that your pain is perhaps not serious. The other tells them your pain perhaps belongs to your disability, where new or changing symptoms are attributed to an existing condition and therefore do not need to be independently investigated. How many of us who live with chronic pain related conditions have heard “oh it’s just a flare” ? Too many of us.
This confluence delays diagnoses, discourages help seeking, and leads to direct and preventable harm. Women with disabilities do not experience sexism or ableism in isolation. We experience both at once – and their combined impact can be more harmful than on its own.
As a state, Victoria has made real progress on women’s pain. The inquiry was genuine. The $153.9 million invested by the Government to transform women’s health is genuine. The investment into Women’s Health Victoria to establish a dedicated phone line to support people who have concerns about care they have received for endometriosis or pelvic pain is genuine, as is the Women’s Pain Standard that is being implemented. These are not small gestures. They are meaningful, structural changes.
But the test of structural change is whether they reach the women who are hardest to reach. And right now, we could do more to ensure that women with disabilities are being reached. We could do more for women with disabilities who are First Nations, who do not speak English as a first language, who live in rural and regional areas with limited service access, who are queer, and those who do not conform to gender binaries. The inquiry’s own report acknowledged that disabled women face greater challenges accessing and navigating health systems and that they often experience systemic discrimination.
Disability is expensive, but women with disabilities are poor. The median weekly income of a person with disabilities in Australia is just $575 per week, compared with $1055 for a person without a disability. Women with disabilities face additional financial challenges on top of this, often experiencing lower workforce participation, interrupted careers, and unpaid caring responsibilities—many women with disabilities also provide care for their loved ones who live with disabilities. And then they may encounter a situation where seeking a second opinion or accessing specialist services may mean paying for the private system, instead of accessing the public one. For a woman receiving the Disability Support Pension, there is often no other door to knock on.
I routinely think about Maryam who has lived with Fibromyalgia since she was a teenager and who in the inquiry’s Report said she spent $28,000 per year on treatments, but her pain was dismissed. I routinely think about how she talked about her “stolen dreams” of being a Doctor or a Lawyer. I believe her, I stand in solidarity with her.
The recent allegations in Victoria have rightly prompted action. That action should extend to what happens when it fails women who have the fewest options to begin with.
While we await news on the Allan Government’s Women’s Pain Action Plan, we hope that women with disabilities’ specific experiences of pain, shaped by the confluence mentioned above, will be embedded in that Plan.
With a State budget to be handed down in May 2026 and the State election to be held on 28 November 2026, our eyes are on the Government and all political parties. Every party seeking the votes of Victorian women has a window to make a genuine commitment to take action to address women’s health needs, including women with disabilities.
What would action to address the confluence of sexism and ableism look like? As the Peak Body and leading voice on the intersection of gender and disability in our state, Women with Disabilities Victoria (WDV) has one part of the answer.
Firstly, we are calling on all parties to commit to embedding consistent gender informed pain-related training for health professionals. Secondly, we are calling for this training to recognises the importance of cohort specific training such as disability specific training as part of their core practice training requirement. And finally, we are calling on all parties to commit to funding a dedicated Pathways to Pain Management for Women with Disabilities initiative, a two-phase program led by women with disabilities who have lived experience that builds on the foundation of the women’s pain inquiry and takes it further. Right now, most health professionals receive little to no training on how pain, gender and disability intersect. We can close that gap.
In the Pathways to Pain Management for Women with Disabilities initiative, WDV would work alongside women and gender diverse people with lived experience of disability and pain to identify exactly where systems may be failing, and where the opportunities for change are. We would then turn that knowledge to a practical, targeted education program for health professionals, built on what women and gender diverse people with disabilities have said they need.
Victoria led the nation with its pain inquiry. Now it can lead the nation on women with disabilities’ health.