Data analytics Invisible unknowns A study of online conversations about health and wellbeing has helped map the scale of the data gap affecting women. By Katie McQuater W omen are 50 per cent more likely to be misdiagnosed after a heart attack because they have different symptoms to men, while, on average, they receive a diagnosis for diabetes 4.5 years later. For women suffering from endometriosis, it can take an average of 7.5 years to be diagnosed. There are still glaring inequalities when it comes to the health of women in how it is understood, discussed and treated. Caroline Criado Perezs book Invisible Women, published in 2019, laid bare the problems caused by a lack of sex-disaggregated data, from heart attacks being misdiagnosed to car-safety systems not taking account of womens measurements. It is one thing to recognise that an area of health 42 needs more research, investment, solutions and awareness, but another to identify exactly what the needs are within that. This was the issue facing the Health Tech Hive, a network of policy-makers, entrepreneurs, engineers, academics and competitors, set up with the aim of building technology solutions to health challenges. Established in response to what co-founders Jasmine Eskenzi and Brigitte West saw as an increasingly siloed health-technology space, the group focused its attention on womens health as a key challenge because of a general awareness that there was a massive data gap, says Eskenzi. Mens bodies are seen as the status quo. Its time we changed this.