Inclusion and exclusion in mid-life lesbians' experiences of the Pap test
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lesbians are said to feel excluded by sexual health messages that presume heterosexuality, a finding linked to lower levels of Papanicolaou (Pap) testing. This paper discusses a small, focused qualitative study based in Calgary, Canada that illuminated mid-life lesbians' experiences and perceptions of Pap testing and health. Participants indicated that they felt compelled and invited to access Pap testing by an inclusive discourse - that of 'mid-life', a period associated with an increased need for body surveillance. They also reflected upon aging as an experience of liberation, increased confidence and a time when they could 'catch up' on health and sexuality issues denied them in their younger days. On the other hand, there was significant uncertainty about Pap testing, human papillomavirus (HPV), cervical cancer and what kind of sexual healthcare is necessary for lesbians, which was reinforced by physician messages suggesting a reduced need for Pap testing when lesbian sexual identity was disclosed. In approaching mid-life lesbian healthcare, we suggest that greater analytical attention should be paid to the ways in which lesbian women are included, as much as excluded, in dominant sexual health scripts particularly by health providers who need to attend to women's diverse experiences and needs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".