‘I am woman - hear me roar in numbers too big to ignore’

Women are registering to vote in amazing numbers in the US election

Jill Wellington/Pexels

I am fascinated by how there seem to be two different perspectives on the US presidential election - the women’s view, and the standard pollsters’ view. It seems to me that this is part of a huge paradigm change that only occasionally comes into view in most media, and it is bigger than voting.

It is about a huge change, I think, in how women view the issues that most affect them and their families and how they plan to act on getting attention paid to those issues. It is about reproductive rights, child care, violence against women, and womens’ health. It is about making women equal citizens in the US. (There is a generational change, too - but that is for another time.)

Apart from the polling analysis of Tom Bonier, which I discovered recently, I have been fascinated by several stories recently that demonstrate how researchers are looking at women’s bodies and women’s health as being distinct from men, who have been the main test subjects of medical research for years. Alison Armstrong, whose work I really enjoy, puts it succinctly; ‘women are not hairy men’. Let me highlight two of those stories. 

Menstrual blood - Qvin

Researchers are working on detecting health issues by analyzing menstrual blood. Half the world bleeds each month, the researchers note, but diagnostic tests that use that blood have not existed until recently.

“Menstrual blood holds the key to better diagnostics,” reported Drug Discovery News in July 2022. “Usually thrown away as waste, menstrual blood may help clinicians non-invasively monitor and diagnose a multitude of health conditions from diabetes and endometriosis to cancer.”

But for years, scientists never considered the diagnostic potential of this monthly blood sample.It was as a medical student that Sara Naseri, now the CEO of the women’s health company Qvin, began to wonder why menstrual blood was the one bodily fluid that was not being used for diagnostics and health monitoring most often. She saw the possibilities.

Now her company tells women, “Your period is now an opportunity for better health. Our vision is to empower you to harness the diagnostic power of your period as an alternative to traditional lab testing.”

She developed the Q-pad to make this possible. “The first and only FDA-cleared menstrual pad scientifically proven to collect blood for lab testing.” It is non-invasive and needle-free - and women use pads during their periods in any case. Check it out at their website.

Diagnosing breast cancer via blood tests

Women know that the traditional ways of diagnosing breast cancer are invasive and uncomfortable. But now, after 10 years of research, Calgary-based Syantra Inc. has developed a blood test that is “changing the way cancer is detected and treated.”  Now that research, in collaboration with Cornell University, has attracted millions of dollars in funding from the US Department of Defense that is funding a three-year, 2,000 participant, clinical study to evaluate the blood test for breast cancer detection at six sites in the US and UK.

The Syantra DX Breast Cancer molecular lab test has received laboratory accreditation in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. It is a “screening blood test for the detection of breast cancer that measures a panel of gene expression biomarkers from whole blood and then uses a software package, developed with machine learning, to interpret data and provide a result of positive or negative.”

Syantra was formed in 2016 by Dr. Tina Rinker, Dr. Ken Fuh, Dr. Randy Moore and Bob Shepherd, conceived from work performed out of the Rinker Lab at University of Calgary in Canada. In 2017 Syantra received the $1.2M Alberta Small Business Research Innovation award and initiated prospective clinical studies – Identify Breast Cancer (IDBC) – in Calgary, Canada; Manchester, UK; Oklahoma City, USA and Seoul, South Korea. In 2021, it received accreditation from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta (CPSA), enabling it to commercialize the Syantra DX™ Breast Cancer screening blood test.

In 1991, the US Congress appropriated $25 million for breast cancer research in the Army's Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation Program for interservice research on breast cancer screening and diagnosis for military women and dependents of military men. In FY 1993, Congress included $210 million in the Defense Appropriations Act to support a peer-reviewed breast cancer research program, largely the result of successful lobbying efforts by the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC).

In 1992, breast cancer patients and survivors had marched on Congress with a compelling request for more research. "They wanted research that was innovative, that was willing to take a risk and that was going to have an impact and leapfrog the field forward," said oncologist and Army Capt. (Dr.) E. Melissa Caime.

Preventing cervical cancer

Decades ago now, an Australian immunologist and his research partner developed a vaccine for HPV that is preventing millions and millions of cases of cervical cancer worldwide and thus saving millions of women from a dreadful illness. 

Yet how often do you read about this huge success? Why is not every health department ensuring that young people are getting vaccinated? And why have Ian Frazer and his research partner not received the Nobel Prize? Is it because their work mostly affects women and girls? If this discovery affected prostate cancer in men, would it not be being shouted from the rooftops?

Frazer was keen to see the vaccine become readily available to women worldwide. “It will be sold first in the developed world, and of course there is a significant benefit for women in countries with effective Pap smear programs, as abnormal smears will be much less likely after vaccination, but the real need is for the developing world and to have this vaccine used routinely in young women to prevent cervical cancer in countries where there are no Pap smear programs to reduce the risk,” he said in 2006.

Since 2018, Australia’s school based National Immunization Program has used Gardasil 9, which protects against nine types of human papillomavirus that cause around 90% of cervical cancers in women (and most other HPV-related cancers in women), 95% of all HPV-related cancers in men and 90% of genital warts across genders.

Australia, which has set a goal of eliminating cervical cancer by 2035, has taken steps to deal with one of the barriers – reluctance to get tested – by introducing self-collection cervical screening tests alongside the new HPV screening tests that replaced the pap smear.

In 2020, a Swedish study of nearly 1.7 million women confirmed that widespread use of the HPV vaccine dramatically reduced the number of women who would develop cervical cancer. In girls vaccinated before age 17, there was a nearly 90% reduction in cervical cancer incidence during the 11-year study period (2006 through 2017) compared with women who had not been vaccinated.

In 2021, a UK study which looked at all cervical cancers diagnosed in England in women aged 20 to 64 between January 2006 and June 2019 showed that the vaccine reduced incidence by 34% in those who received it aged 16 to 18, 62% if aged 14 to 16 and 90% in those vaccinated aged 12 to 13. The UK implemented a HPV vaccine program for teenage girls in 2008.

“Primary prevention of cervical cancer is best achieved by high levels of HPV immunization among girls aged 9–14,” WHO said, urging all countries to introduce HPV vaccines to protect more girls and women from cervical cancer and all its consequences over the course of their lifetimes. 

Women registering to vote

It is only recently that I learned about the work of pollster Tom Bonier. Back in 2022, after the US Supreme Court scathingly ended the right to abortion that US women had held for half a century, he tracked what happened and wrote about it in the New York Times on Sep. 3, 2022.

“In my 28 years of analyzing elections, I had never seen anything like what’s happened in the past two months in American politics: Women are registering to vote in numbers I never witnessed before. I’ve run out of superlatives to describe how different this moment is, especially in light of the cycles of tragedy and eventual resignation of recent years. This is a moment to throw old political assumptions out the window and to consider that Democrats could buck historic trends this cycle.”

“One of the first big signs that things had changed came from Kansas. After voters there defeated in a landslide a constitutional amendment that would have removed abortion protections in the state, I sought to understand how activists could have accomplished such an astounding upset. While it takes several weeks for state election officials to produce full reports on who voted in any given election, there was an immediate clue. I looked at new voter registrants in the state since the June 24 Dobbs decision.”

“As shocking as the election result was to me, what I found was more striking than any single election statistic I can recall discovering throughout my career. Sixty-nine percent of those new registrants were women. In the six months before Dobbs, women outnumbered men by a three-percentage-point margin among new voter registrations. After Dobbs, that gender gap skyrocketed to 40 points. Women were engaged politically in a way that lacked any known precedent.” (my emphasis)

A clear pattern emerged as he repeated the analysis, he said. “My team and I found large surges in women registering to vote relative to men, when comparing the period before June 24 and after. The pattern was clearest in states where abortion access was most at risk and where the electoral stakes for abortion rights this November were the highest.”

Now, according to a substack by Jason Stanford, Bonier has found since US President Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy, voter registration among young Black women had increased more than 175% in a dozen states by the end of August. Journalists were astounded; had he double-checked those figures? “It’s incredibly unusual to see changes in voter registration that are anywhere close to this. ... You just don’t see that sort of thing happen in elections normally,” he replied.

Bonier then found a similar pattern in the 38 states for which data was available at the time. Since Biden withdrew, non-white women under 30 were registering to vote at double and sometimes triple their usual rates. New registrations among Black women under 30 increased by 262% compared to the same week in 2020, he wrote on Twitter (now called X).

And that was before mega-star Taylor Swift weighed in with her endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Now, as Stanford admits, this kind of analysis goes against what most pollsters are saying.

But I think, as I watch what women are saying and doing - and especially the contrast between the loving way women and men are portraying cats and cat ladies, vs the horrific and untrue Trump/Vance claims about immigrants eating pets - my feeling also is that most of those standard pollsters are missing something.

I think many American women have decided that it is time to stand up and be counted, not just in the ballot boxes, but in all the other crucial areas like women’s health and women’s health research, family support and child care, and the safety of themselves and their children. Men talk; women do.

And every time I hear those people roar “We’re not going back” at Kamala’s rallies, I hear an echo of Helen Reddy’s “I am Woman, hear me roar.” I played that song over and over for a week after the 2016 US election results.

I am woman, hear me roar

In numbers too big to ignore

And I know too much to go back an' pretend

'Cause I've heard it all before

And I've been down there on the floor

And no one's ever gonna keep me down again

It took time - but I think that moment is here, at long last.