THERE’s a sign up in all the women’s toilets in Glasgow Sheriff Court. “In an event of an emergency,” it reads, “if you require sanitary products, please speak to a member of the security staff.” 

It’s so comedically alarmist that it makes me chortle and my mind boggle in equal parts every time. 

I’m not sure being caught short counts as an emergency event but we all have our own perspectives, don’t we?

Perhaps, though, we need this big drama energy around female biology to permeate further – a push of urgency to solving the chronic inequality in women's health outcomes. 

Nearly a year on from the Scottish Government’s Women’s Health Plan launch, the UK government has now released a women's health strategy for England, following recognition, as in Scotland, that the health system does not adequately serve women's needs. 

The English health secretary, Steve Barclay, called the new plans a “landmark moment” in tackling widespread health inequality over a 10-year plan.

It’s almost charming to see this government talking about 10 year plans, given its day-to-day lurching from disaster to disaster.

There are plenty of solid, practical suggestions: £10 million more funding for mobile breast cancer screening; update endometriosis guidelines; widen access to IVF; and providing a pregnancy loss certificate when a baby dies within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy. 

The headline-grabbing development, however, was that from the 2024/25 academic year, students and new doctors in England will receive mandatory training to improve the treatment of female medical conditions.

Women consistently say, and have said for an interminably long time, that the system fails to listen to them when they come forward to ask for help with their healthcare needs.

The English health plan came from a consultation that spoke to 100,000 women and some 84 per cent of those said they had felt "ignored or not listened to" when approaching doctors.

I've seen women responding on social media to these plans for curated training. The overwhelming reaction has been disbelief - that mandatory training isn't already on offer but not that it's not already on offer. 

We know that our health needs are so often undermined and downplayed.

The BBC had a brilliant clip of women talking about female health problems in the hairdressers. "You've either got a vagina or a voice, you don't seem to have both," says one of the women, neatly summarising. 

As with so many women's issues, it always seems that these are things that should have been dealt with by now. Women read these proposals and don't feel gratitude but rather fury that they have taken so long. 

In a well used quote, the writer Caroline Criado Perez details in her book, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, how the healthcare system is “systematically discriminating against women, leaving them chronically misunderstood, mistreated and misdiagnosed”.

When women's health minister Maree Todd launched Scotland's women's health plan last August she, too, quoted Criado Perez and spoke of how women's heart attack symptoms are often described as "atypical presentation" when what is meant is that the symptoms are atypical for men but perfectly typical for women.

Heart health is one area in particular in which women are poorly served in a health system designed for men but, in overall health, they lose out too.

Women live longer than men but they also spend more of their lives in poor health than men do, limiting their ability to participate fully in their work and social lives.

With specifically female issues, problems with prescribing HRT and interminably long waiting lists for endometriosis treatment are now well publicised. 

Not only was the healthcare system designed by men for men, education systems were designed by men for men. It's only 130 years since the British Medical Association acknowledged female doctors but now female medical students outnumber male. 

Around 45% of doctors registered in the UK are women but, as with so many things, the number drops as posts become more senior.

The most senior posts are dominated by men while the gender pay gap is also significant. 

Women GPs outnumber men but this is a relatively new phenomenon, happening for the first time in 2014. Widespread, systemic change takes a long while. 

We are hopefully at the tail end of decades of systemic ignorance of female bodies and their differing functions. I hope, in the future, younger women find that their health needs are being met and that the plentiful testimony of women who feel they have not been listened to is for the history books

But being a woman doesn’t necessarily make one more sympathetic to the plight of other women nor any less likely to be dismissive. 

I’ve been as undermined by women doctors as I have by men. It was two female GPs, on separate occasions, who offered me anti-depressants when I presented with real, physical pain rather than acknowledge the pain was real. 

The NHS is always spoken of as one homogenous mass. It’s easy to forget the great many, greatly disparate individuals who make up the NHS.

Both doctors and patients might balk at the thought of mass sexism pervading the medical system but everyone is influenced by biases and, no matter how alert to those biases they feel they are or how able to correct them they feel, they will be influenced. Others will have their own more overt prejudices. 

They are then operating within a system that has never prioritised the female experience. Crowning that, the system and the people in it are under fantastic pressure. GPs report high stress levels, feelings of being unable to cope and working long hours, far more than they are paid for. 

The solution to supporting women to advocate for themselves, to stop them feeling they are being dismissed and their health needs not taken seriously, involves listening.  

It involves really hearing what women tell say and treating this testimony as though it is credible. 

That, of course, involves time, a medical resource in true short supply while chronic understaffing in the NHS persists.