Report: 82% Of Healthcare Appointments Booked For Men Are Made By Women
Increasingly, women are the "healthkeepers" of many of their family members.
At this point, you’re probably familiar with women taking on the bulk of the mental load and invisible labor of the household. However, a new report reveals just how much moms are taking on when it comes to ‘healthkeeping’ — the care of their loved ones' mental and physical health.
Specifically, the third annual What Patients Want report from healthcare platform Zocdoc found that women are taking on the brunt of healthcare planning for their families, including themselves, their kids, and their parents — sometimes along with their husbands and their husbands’ parents as well.
The report, which analyzes data from the company as well as from a national Censuswide survey of 1,000 U.S. adults, found that 52% of women manage someone else’s healthcare when it comes to finding medical professionals, scheduling appointments, and coordinating care. And another staggering 29% of women manage the healthcare of three or more other people.
When it comes to appointment scheduling, 76% of all appointments booked for someone else were made by women, and 82% of appointments booked for men by others were scheduled by women.
For appointments for Gen A patients (kids under the age of 15), only 6% of appointments were booked by men.
“It feels like I’m constantly scheduling something for myself or my two young kids,” one mom, Zoe, told ZocDoc about managing her family’s healthcare. “There’s always another check-up, sick visit, or school form to handle. I try to fit it in after school drop-off, between meetings, or at night when the kids go to bed—usually while I’m doing something else at the same time.”
Why are women faced with more of the “healthkeeping” in their families? Like other parts of the mental load, caretaking tasks often fall on our shoulders, especially when it comes to kids or our parents. If we dig a little deeper, we see that moms often have better family leave and therefore end up taking their babies to the doctors at the beginning of their lives — and that trend continues even after mom goes back to work. And since moms often know more about their kids' daily lives and needs (because they are default parents), they make appointments because they’re more familiar with their kids’ health and medical needs.
In addition, men generally do not go to the doctor as much as women and are significantly less likely to go in for regular check-ups and screenings. According to a recent study by the Cleveland Clinic, close to 60 percent of men don’t regularly see a doctor and only seek medical care when they are seriously ill. Only one in five men goes in for an annual physical. Another study by the Centers for Disease Control found that women are 33% more likely to go to the doctor and 100% better at screening and preventative care. One hundred percent!!
So, it’s likely that many of these men literally wouldn’t go to the doctor at all unless someone who loves them makes the appointment.
You can read the full Zocdoc report here.
