This blog post is a youth-written piece authored by Keerthi Kannan, a 2025 Girl Up Teen Advisor. Drawing from her lived experience and leadership as a young advocate, Keerthi shares insights on women’s health, an issue that she is particularly passionate about. Her voice is part of a global cohort of Teen Advisors working to advance gender equity and youth leadership. To learn more about Keerthi and meet the full 2025 Girl Up Teen Advisor cohort, read our blog here.
We Need an Information Revolution: On Women’s Health Awareness
When I first opened Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez in 8th grade, I expected to learn something. I didn’t expect to have my entire worldview altered, and have my work over the next few years to very heavily focus on making a change regarding the issues brought up in the book–particularly in regards to women’s health.
My name is Keerthisri Kannan, and I’m currently a Teen Advisor at GirlUp. Alongside my fellow advocates, one of the things I aim to tackle is the lack of education regarding female anatomy–namely, our health, medical reactions and tendencies, and reproductive treatments. In the field of both medical research and healthcare providing, there exist large gender disparities; in order to bridge these gaps, I believe that we first need to educate the people on the fact that these gaps exist, and spread awareness on what specifically constitutes the aforementioned disparities.
When I say there are disparities, I don’t mean it in a vague “oh men have it better” way, though they do have it better in this situation. I mean it in a “medical trials weren’t required to include women until 1993 so that means that almost all the medical information and data we collected before then applies to men only, even if it’s treated as being applicable to everyone” way. I mean it in a “women were twice as likely to face adverse effects to more than 80 different FDA approved medications” way. I mean it in a “erectile dysfunction affects 19% of men, but has five times as much research done on it in comparison to PMS, which affects 90% of women” way. And this isn’t even cracking the surface–in addition to the issue of women’s health being under-researched and underfunded, there’s also the persistent problem of healthcare providers not having enough education or awareness regarding women’s bodies to diagnose and treat them appropriately, and of course there’s also the lack of access to maternity and reproductive care faced by many women.
All of which sounds very gloom-and-doom. I know. It’s scary, especially when we consider the push to roll back decades of progress in many countries right now, as increasingly right-wing politicians come to power. But I do believe that we can all play our part to weather this storm. Personally, I’ve created an online toolkit, complete with an informational brochure, fundraising ideas, grassroots lobbying templates, and other helpful links. If we organize efficiently enough, I believe that we can successfully campaign to increase public awareness of women’s health. We, as youth, need to step up and lead a revolution built on shared values of knowledge, education, resilience, and empathy. It’s going to be hard, but I have faith in us.
And for all you changemakers reading this, here’s the link to the toolkit so you can start making waves 🙂
