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My partner is a fiercely sceptical health and science journalist.
A couple of weeks ago, she was invited on a promotional tour of a wellbeing resort. There were zero-carb meals, mindfulness lectures, warnings about the dangers of fluoride, and advice on matching your microbiome to your blood type.
Gluten, she was warned, could cause her skin to split; a yeast cleanout was promoted for $690.
None of this will raise an eyebrow to anyone who has spent time on Gwenyth Paltrow’s Goop storefront, not that the resort was related to Goop.
Gwyneth Paltrow at a Goop event in 2020.Credit: Getty Images
What intrigues me is the targeting. I did not get an invitation. I rarely get pitched New Age or “woo-woo” stories or products. My social media feeds are full of ads for health insurance, share trading and watches.
“I think women are incredibly targeted,” says Annie McCubbin, who in 2021 published a book entitled Why Smart Women Make Bad Decisions.
“Of course men are vulnerable to mis- and -disinformation. But women, having to be young, fit, spiritually plugged in, vegan, sexy, the whole thing … The pressure on us, under the male gaze, is huge.”
In today’s Examine: is health misinformation gendered? Are women more likely to be fed New Age, woo-woo ideas – and are they more likely to believe them?
Let’s start with the key context: women’s health is an information vacuum.
For decades, scientists have preferred to study male humans and animals because they are “more predictable”, or because they did not think they should study women, or because it would be personally embarrassing, or because they simply couldn’t find any women (no, really).
The wellness industry has stepped in to fill this gap, McCubbin argues.
Women are particularly likely to turn to the internet for information about “stigmatised” health conditions, data suggests. You can see why when you think about the difficult route to a diagnosis for polycystic ovary syndrome or endometriosis, which typically runs through delay and medical system denial.
In contrast, the wellness industry “hears women and believes them when they say something is wrong,” writes Natalie Jolly in a paper published in the journal Birth.
Says McCubbin: “Women go to a homoeopath or a naturopath because they give them time, they are kind and nice to them. They fill that gap that is left by medicine.”
Some people turn to alternative medicine when they have had a poor experience with Western medicine.Credit: Shutterstock
The data backs this up: women are more likely to use alternative medicine, often driven by a negative experience with the Western health system – or by a sense alternative medicine is more natural and more empowering, giving them the ability to take personal control over their healthcare (we’ll return to this key idea in a moment). And Australian women “dominate” the vitamin and supplement market, per Roy Morgan research.
What role does the internet play?
There’s some Australian evidence suggesting that young, educated and better-off women are more likely to seek out health information online.
But the internet is a fraught place to seek out health information. Up to half of posts about vaccines on social media are misinformation, one study found; some social media studies put misinformation rates as high as 87 per cent.
Trust in science – or trust in yourself?
None of that data is terribly conclusive. Women buy more vitamins and visit alternative medical practitioners more often – but the data does not really show why, beyond a sense that the Western medical system isn’t delivering.
Are women more vulnerable than men to misinformation? I’m sceptical.
Australian men, not women, were more likely to believe COVID-19 misinformation.
Women are less likely to hold folk-wisdom medical beliefs. Trust in science correlates strongly with people not believing misinformation, and across a range of scientific claims women are more likely to trust science than men.
Dr Simon Copland offers a different perspective. At the Australian National University he studies misinformation in the “manosphere” – the ball of collective online rage that has formed around the likes of Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson.
Andrew Tate (left) and Jordan Peterson.Credit: X/@Cobratate; Getty Images
“You see a lot of men who are feeling a level of dissatisfaction with the world, with their social structures,” he says. Tate and Peterson “sell a really simple narrative to explain what’s going wrong in men’s lives”. The manosphere offers self-help in the guise of gym sessions, supplements, “things to make you super-masculine”.
Wellness offers women an alternative to a medical system that does not take them seriously. The manosphere offers men an alternative thought system to a world they don’t like. The two are different sides of the same coin.
“Self-help movements target men to do masculine things and women to do feminine things. But the message is you have to do these things to look after yourself – because the government or the state is not looking after you,” Copland says.
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