HIV impacts hundreds of thousands of women. Here's how. - LGBTQ Nation

"The truth, of course, is that anyone can contract HIV, given the right circumstance, and according to the Yale University Library's online exhibition " We Are Everywhere: Lesbians in the Archive," by 1991 roughly 40% of HIV-positive people and 12% of AIDS patients in the U.S. were women. But a combination of longstanding bias in the medical field and the perception of HIV/AIDS as a gay epidemic led to women being excluded from research studies and clinical trials."

"As investigative reporter Gena Corea notes in her 1992 book, The Invisible Epidemic: The Story of Women and AIDS, doctors with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) initially didn't even think women could get AIDS, leading to many HIV-positive women dying without ever being diagnosed. As The Well Project notes, until recently, research on women and HIV continued to lag significantly behind research on how the virus impacts men."

"In the U.S. today, women account for approximately one in five new HIV diagnoses and 22% of the estimated 1.2 million people living with the virus, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of CDC data published in 2024. Black women in the U.S. account for roughly half of all new HIV diagnoses among women, as Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) noted in a recent House resolution to recognize National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day."

The HIV/AIDS epidemic has been widely perceived as primarily affecting gay men, but anyone can contract HIV. By 1991, roughly 40% of HIV-positive people and 12% of AIDS patients in the U.S. were women, yet longstanding medical bias and epidemic framing led to exclusion of women from studies and clinical trials. Early CDC skepticism meant many HIV-positive women died undiagnosed. Research on women and HIV lagged behind that on men. Today women represent about one in five new U.S. diagnoses; Black women account for roughly half of new diagnoses among women, and transgender women face high prevalence.

Read at LGBTQ Nation