On Jan. 1, Hairspray star Ricki Lake posted a photo of herself with a closely shaven head on Instagram. In the caption, Lake explained she has been suffering from hair loss for 30 years, causing her deep pain and trauma. There have been a few times where I have even felt suicidal over it, she wrote.

Her vulnerability struck a chord with the public. The post garnered a flurry of media coverage and more than 70,000 likes.

Its not often we see images of bald women in mainstream media. Female hair loss remains a taboo. But why?

Although cultural aesthetics do not idealize male baldness, theres more of a widespread acceptance of men without hair. This gender bias is not only arbitrary, its damaging to the self-esteem of the estimated 30 million women in the U.S. affected by some form of hair loss . According to the Cleveland Clinic, a leading nonprofit medical research organization, 50% of U.S. women will confront hair loss at some point in their lives, whether due to pregnancy, birth control, thyroid function, chemotherapy, stress or autoimmune diseases like alopecia and lupus.