Lady Business: Taking women’s health seriously; Most Powerful Women reports

Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 135th issue, published October 31, 2021.

Medical Dismissals and Disclosures

“I was fainting constantly, I was feeling weak, and I went to see this neurologist. He said, ‘Sweetie, you’re just a tired mom.’ It was infuriating.”

As part of my profile this month of Fidji Simo, the former Facebook executive turned Instacart CEO, we spent a fair amount of time discussing women’s health in general and hers in particular. Simo has suffered from various chronic conditions since she was a teenager, when she started experiencing very painful periods and developed other symptoms of endometriosis. It’s a condition that affects one in every 10 women—but also one that many women struggle to have taken seriously by their doctors, despite the very real pain and reproductive difficulties it causes them.

Simo, for example, didn’t get her endometriosis diagnosed until she was 29, and had suffered a miscarriage. “Women are told at a very young age that atrocious pain during a period is completely normal and you just have to suck it up,” she told me. “Whereas, if any man had the pain of endometriosis, we would have solved it by now!”

This sort of medical attitude about the common health conditions affecting women is perfect Onion fodder: absurd yet persistent. In many areas: This week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration released new rules for pharma companies and plastic surgeons about the warnings they must now give women about the many and sometimes-fatal risks of breast implants, which I investigated for Fortune last year. The FDA’s new rules were stronger than expected from the final guidance that it released a year ago—but they’re also pretty basic. Pharma companies will now have to label their breast implants with a “black box” warning, and they will only be allowed to sell them to doctors or other health-care providers who review the potential health risks with patients before surgery, using an FDA-mandated checklist.

Basic disclosures, right? But breast implants have been sold for decades without these warnings, even though women have been asking the FDA for years to put stronger rules in place.

Simo, for her part, has spent some of the past year cofounding a new women’s health startup, the Metrodora Institute, which will treat and research “complex neuroimmune” disorders that primarily affect women. These conditions include endometriosis and another disorder Simo now suffers from, POTS, or postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome; they also include migraines, chronic fatigue syndrome, and even long COVID.

“It’s giving the industry a blueprint for how women should be treated in the medical world,” Simo says. “If you start believing women, and you start believing that they’re not crazy every time they say they have pain somewhere, you can improve health outcomes."

Lady Bits

—Fortune held its first in-person Most Powerful Women conference since 2019 earlier this month, in Washington, DC, and it was extremely exciting to be doing interviews off Zoom and in person. (If a little nerve-wracking to once again have to figure out what to wear on my legs and feet!) I got to interview executives including: CVS CEO Karen Lynch; Square CFO Amrita Ajuha and Coinbase COO Emilie Choi; and Vaxxinity CEO Mei Mei Hu.

—Other recent CEOs I’ve interviewed for Fortune: Pfizer’s Albert Bourla and Rent the Runway’s Jennifer Hyman.

—I generally enjoyed the new Dune, even if it did feel about 45 minutes too long, and even if I’ve since giggled at all the memes about Zendaya being stuck in a perfume commercial and Jason Momoya being stuck playing a badass futuristic super soldier somehow named “Duncan Idaho.” Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica was terrific, and got to be the story’s protagonist almost as much as her character’s son did. I also loved Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Liet Kynes, a genderswapped version of a character I had forgotten from the novel but who became this film’s satisfying secret weapon.

—"We were kind of innocent and naïve, thinking that people will behave well, but this is not the case, even on a Web site about yarn.” I’m a few months late to this New Yorker feature about the politics-induced existential crisis of knitting social-media site Ravelry, but it feels appropriate—perhaps even meta!—this week to read about how some social-media CEOs think about balancing their responsibilities towards users with their responsibilities towards the wider world.

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