The Pain Gap

Mothers in America face serious systemic inequalities and challenges, from lack of paid leave to affordable childcare to the wage gap. So why does the solution to all our woes always seem to point to a bottle, or two, of booze? On this episode of The Pain Gap, I sit down with author, sobriety influencer and host “The Sober Mom Life” podcast, Suzanne Wayre for an honest conversation about alcohol a...

Are you experiencing hair thinning or breakage? Is your skin becoming dry, tight, and itchy? Is your chin spouting out random hairs you've never seen? Welcome to perimenopause, the near decade-long transition to menopause! In midlife, our hormones get on a rollercoaster, and all that chaos shows up on our skin and in our hair. I feel so lucky to have this conversation with Dr. Corinne Erickson bec...

Americans are drinking less alcohol at record low numbers, but what does this mean for women? This week on the show, I speak with Kristen Bear, writer and founder of Creative Sobriety, a modern, multi-platform resource for the sober and sober curious. We talk about sobriety, why women and creatives find such empowerment in it, and how the alcohol industry targets women. In one of the show's most p...

Can you get hormone replacement therapy after Breast Cancer? What do you do if your doctor doesn’t “believe” in hormone replacement therapy? Or worse, doesn’t listen to you seriously about your symptoms? In this episode, I am joined by Dr. Jordan Emont, board-certified OB/GYN and Menopause Society Certified Practitioner whose practice is built on the cases most clinicians decline. He founded Emont...

Attorney and author Jennifer Weiss-Wolf serves as executive director of NYU Law’s Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center. She also leads partnerships and strategy at Ms ., the feminist movement-making magazine. A passionate writer and advocate for issues of gender and politics, Jen was dubbed the “architect of the U.S. campaign to squash the tampon tax” by Newsweek . She has presented on issues relate...

Women are living longer than before, so why do we still have to fight ageism to be seen? In this episode, I speak with Jacynth Bassett, founder and CEO of Ageism Is Never In Style, a Global Platform For Age Inclusion. As an anti-ageism pioneer, Jacynth is a powerful and influential voice in the age-inclusive, longevity space, using her platform to inspire change for all ages and champion intergene...

Are your labs normal but you’re feeling terrible? Our guest today knows all about that life. After experiencing years of "normal" lab results while feeling anything but healthy, Rachel Stephens, Rachel Stephens, Holistic Health Practitioner, Integrative Health Practitioner (IHP) and First Line Therapy Lifestyle Educator, set out to understand what conventional medicine was missing. That personal j...

What happens when your body goes into menopause early? That’s what happened to Menopause Coach and Women’s Health Specialist, Julie Parana after she had a hysterectomy at 42 yrs old. In this powerful episode, Julie talks to me all about how “she lived it, then studied it.” We discuss the barrage of symptoms women experience in perimenopause, and how these major changes can last up to a decade befo...

Today on the show, I am joined by Allison Butler, Senior Lecturer and Associate Chair in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is also the Vice President of the Media Freedom Foundation and the author of The Judgment of Gender: How Women are Centered and Silenced in Pop Culture . Allison and I talk about how women are presented in mainstream media and soci...

Our guest today is Dr. Khiara M. Bridges. She is a professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law and a leading expert on race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Her scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and the Columbia Law Review among others. She is also the author of three books: Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a S...

Dr. Veronica Gillispie-Bell is one of the leading voices in maternal health, patient safety, and reproductive justice. Dr. G sits at the intersection of clinical care, public health, and policy, and this conversation is as urgent as it is eye-opening. From Black maternal mortality and medical bias to fibroids, pain dismissal, and the dangerous fragmentation of our healthcare system, she breaks dow...

Jennifer Dunatov is a healthcare ethicist and birth justice advocate dedicated to exposing the ethical failures embedded within America’s maternal healthcare system. In this powerful episode of The Pain Gap, Jennifer joins Anushay Hossain for an unflinching conversation about birth trauma, informed consent, obstetric violence, and why childbirth remains one of the clearest reflections of systemic...

Deeyah Khan was raised in Norway by Pakistani and Afghan parents. Deeyah reflects on growing up feeling caught between worlds and how art, activism, and music became both refuge and resistance. She shares how her early experiences shaped her Emmy and BAFTA-winning work documenting white supremacy, violent extremism, gender-based violence, and the dangerous rise of authoritarian movements around th...

Mara Santilli is a journalist and researcher asking some of the most urgent and uncomfortable questions about women’s health, power, and who gets to control our bodies. Mara is a leading voice examining the intersection of contraception, culture, and systemic inequality. Her work unpacks everything from the rise of “tradwife” content and anti-birth control rhetoric to the deeply rooted histories o...

We’re joined by Kellie Pean and Alyssa Convertini-Lindquist, co-founders of Brand New: A Collective, a bicoastal, award-winning marketing agency spanning creative, strategy, experiential production, and talent partnerships. But beyond building a powerhouse agency rooted in cultural insight, Kellie and Alyssa are redefining what leadership looks like for women, especially in industries that weren’t...

We’re joined by urologist, author, and one of the most unfiltered voices in women’s sexual health, Dr. Kelly Casperson. What started as one patient’s pain became a complete career shift, one that led Dr. Casperson to uncover just how deeply women are underserved, dismissed, and undereducated when it comes to their bodies, especially in midlife and beyond. In this conversation, we get into the syst...

Reed Beeley is a clinician working at the intersection of mental health, addiction, and ADHD, and what he's seeing points to something much bigger than individual diagnosis. It's a systemic gap in how ADHD is understood, identified, and treated in women. In this conversation, we unpack why ADHD is so often missed, starting with diagnostic criteria built around how symptoms present in boys, not gir...

Parul Somani was 31 years old, newly postpartum, and had just brought her baby home from the NICU… when she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer. What followed wasn't just a fight for her life; it was a complete unraveling of everything she thought she knew about control, success, and certainty. Because like so many women, Parul had done everything "right", the degrees, the career, the plan...

For millions of women, what we’ve been told is anxiety, depression, or just “getting older”… is actually something else entirely. Today, we’re talking about menopause, not just as a biological transition, but as a mental health crisis hiding in plain sight. Mandi Dixon is a therapist who began noticing a pattern: women walking into her office saying, “I don’t feel like myself,” after being dismiss...

Dr. Zed Zha is a physician, writer, and author of the forthcoming book Consented: A Doctor’s Call to End Medical Violence and Reclaim Patient Autonomy. In this powerful conversation, Dr. Zha takes us inside the hidden culture of medicine to expose how consent is too often treated as paperwork instead of an ongoing act of trust, transparency, and respect. We talk about what happens when medical tra...

Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs is a sociologist, 2x NYT bestselling author, and one of the sharpest thinkers we have on erasure, patriarchy, and the stories that shape power. If you've ever felt like women, especially women of color, are living in a version of history edited out of our minds, this conversation will hit home. Anna and I talk about what it means to be erased, not just from textbooks, but fr...

This week on The Pain Gap , Anushay sits down with acclaimed novelist and memoirist Darcey Steinke, author of Flash Count Diary and the new book This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith , for a deeply honest conversation about menopause, female pain, sexuality, aging, and what it means to stop performing and start telling the truth, finally. Darcey reflects on what it was like to enter menopaus...

Adrianne Nickerson is a healthcare operator and entrepreneur who built Oula after years of working inside major health systems and consulting on healthcare transformation. And if you’ve ever wondered why maternity care feels so outdated, so fragmented, and, too often, so unsafe, Adrianne is one of the clearest voices I’ve heard on what’s broken… and what a better system can actually look like. In...

Today’s episode is part of a special one-on-one series featuring some of the most urgent and incisive thinkers of our time. And this conversation is exactly that. I’m joined by writer and feminist theorist Soraya Chemaly to talk about rage, resilience, and what she calls male supremacy, not as a buzzword, but as a belief system that shapes our politics, our culture, and our most intimate relations...

There’s a moment so many women, especially women of color, know in their bones: you finally try to put yourself first. You say no. You set a boundary. You admit you’re not okay. And suddenly, you’re labeled: selfish, dramatic, ungrateful… bad. Today, I’m sitting down with Tracy Vadakumchery, known as the “ Bad Indian Therapist,” to unpack what “bad” really means within rigid cultural expectations,...