Cat Bohannon

We all live inside paradigms that profoundly shape human thought and work like cognitive blinders, and there are few more limiting than the deeply held cultural assumptions we’ve made about how bodies should be and work. In this urgent and engaging lecture, Bohannon walks through some of the key recent discoveries in the biology of sex differences, which are the direct result of finally peeking past the male norm in science and medicine. Challenging the idea of a “weaker sex,” Bohannon points to research showing that women are not weaker when it comes to infections, cancer, or even severe traumatic brain injuries–and to how researchers might look to these differences to save lives and discover better treatments.

The differences between male and female bodies are about more than reproduction, or superficial differences in how we look—they also inform areas as subtle and as crucial as how we see, hear, taste, and experience the world. In this interactive, multimedia event, Cat Bohannon leads a tour through sex differences in the primate sensory array and how they still shape our perception of the world today. This event can include an informal “experiment” to have guests compare data on how they smell, listen, and taste, leaving participants with eye-opening insights into their unconscious sex and gender biases.

It’s an open secret in the medical sciences that many prescriptions on the market today have not been studied on female bodies at all. We’re just starting to remedy that fact, and as a result, women are often given ineffective doses of medication, have their pain dismissed, or feel like they need to “know a guy who knows a guy” to unlock a standard of care which should be the norm. In this talk Bohannan talks about the double-edged sword of mistrust and mistreatment in medical care for female patients: Women need to trust the science more and scientists and doctors need to trust women more–about their pain, their symptoms, and their experience. Bohannon shows how centuries of male-focused science led us to this point, and asks how can we build better medicine for women.

The most important human invention was not fire, not stone tools, not the wheel, not penicillin, but gynecology. The only way we were able to populate the planet was by getting a handle on our inherently wonky reproductive system. In this lecture, Cat Bohannon shares the surprising facts that Lucy had a midwife, Homo Habilis had birth control, and Homo Erectus had some early ape version of abortion, most likely, because other mammals did too. This talk also examines how sexism and gynecology are two sides of the same coin, which co-evolved as a way for us to innovate around our species’ terrible reproductive system. But Bohannon argues that gynecology has vastly outpaced sexism in this regard, and that an innovation like sexism–which once had a specific and beneficial evolutionary purpose–is actually starting to kill us.