My medical education, more than 40 years ago, was centred around the male body as the normative human being. As the American feminist and legal activist Catherine Mackinnon wrote only a few years later in Difference and Dominance: on sex discrimination: ‘A male body is the human body; all those extra things women have are studied in ob/gyn’. That was at a time when there was no imperative even to include women in randomised controlled trials of treatment, and they were excluded for many more years because the impact of their pesky hormonal fluctuations got in the way of standardising groups and making comparison between subjects.