It’s a not uncommon statement: that if men got breast cancer then there’d be a cure already.

The sort of thing said by one who has perhaps been imbibing just a little too much feminism and not quite enough analytical logic. For there’s a very simple two word answer to that allegation: prostate cancer.

Now it is true that there are more women getting gender specific cancers than men: women’s reproductive systems are larger and more complex than men’s and it’s really not that much of a stretch to associate cancer with system complexity.

The ratio of new gender-specific cancers in 2008 was 1.32 new female cases of cancer for every one male case.

There are a couple more complicating factors though. Some estimates are that more than 50% of men get prostate cancer: it’s just very slow growing and most die of something else before it either kills them or is even spotted. We also need to take account of the fact that cancer is predominantly a disease of the old. And there are more old women than there are men so we’d expect female cancer cases to be higher than men: whether that quite carries over into gender specific cancers is moot.

However, the original allegation is really that not enough effort is put into trying to cure women’s as opposed to men’s cancers. Which really doesn’t seem to be true:

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) estimate that they will spend $4,446,000,000 in 2009 for female-specific cancers (breast cancer, cervical cancer, ovarian cancer, and “women’s health”) and $299,000,000 for men’s cancer (prostate cancer), which is a ratio of almost 15:1 in favor of women (see chart below). For spending in 2009 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Cancer Programs, the gap is even greater: they will spend $218 million on female-specific cancers (breast, cervical, ovarian and gynecologic cancer) and $13.245 million on prostate cancer, which is a ratio of 16.5 to 1 in favor of women.

So hugely more is spent on trying to research female cancers rather than male. And yes, it’s true that women do get more cancers and those they get are more deadly. But by nowhere near the difference in such spending.

So it looks like the answer to the existence of breast cancer is not that men, who make all the decisions (in that feminist mindset), don’t care: it’s that beating breast cancer is difficult. We’re working on it, but it is difficult.