‘‘Our healthcare system is gaslighting us as women. This arrogant culture contributes to misdiagnosis, long wait times, and lower survival rates for illnesses.’’

Just over half of us carry a serious health risk: we are women. Yes, we are going to talk about women’s problems. But don’t look away boys, this concerns you too.

For far too long, the health system has failed wa¯ hine. Our specific health needs and concerns are overlooked, dismissed and denied.

And it’s killing us.

Every 48 hours one New Zealander dies from ovarian cancer, the fifth most common cause of female cancer death, and the least survivable.

Yet women experience barriers to accessing blood tests and ultrasounds, next to nothing is spent on raising awareness, and there are no national guidelines for diagnosis. Talk Peach, a gynaecological awareness charity, believes one in four women take a year or longer to be diagnosed.

In each year, 50 women will die of cervical cancer. On Tuesday, 37-year-old Conservation and Civil Defence Minister Kiri Allan announced that she had been diagnosed with cervical cancer.

It should be preventable, but almost one-third of teenage Kiwi girls and even fewer boys remain unvaccinated. It’s troubling that the cervical smear screening programme is backlogged because of Covid-19, with 22,000 women waiting for tests.

More than a quarter of us dodge smear tests, with higher rates of avoidance among Ma¯ ori, Pasifika and Asian women.

Allan spoke for many of us when she said: ‘‘I’m one of those gals that hates anything do with ‘down there’. And have taken a ‘see no evil, hear no evil’type approach to that part of my body’.’’

Yes, it saves lives. But having a clinician take a swab from ‘down there’ can be unpleasant, embarrassing, and occasionally hurts.

There is an alternative to the intimate