Historically women were not included in medical research. This was due to concerns about reproductive health and widely held assumptions that sex differences were not significant.
In 1993, Congress passed a law that NIH-funded research must ensure women and minorities inclusion in all clinical research and that such differences should be reported and evaluated. Compliance with both parts of this law were difficult.
Although progress has been made, biomedical science still often fails to analyze data by sex and underfunding of women’s health issues remains.
According to a 2021 study in the Journal of Women’s Health, the National Institutes of Health (the nation’s largest funder of biomedical research) “applies a disproportionate share of its resources to diseases that affect primarily men, at the expense of those that affect primarily women.” In nearly three-quarters of the cases where a disease primarily affects one gender, the funding pattern favors males.
A 2021 report by the Women’s Health Access Matters (WHAM) found that:
- •Only 12% of federal funding on Alzheimer’s Disease goes towards women-specific research even though the vast majority of sufferers are women.
- •Male animals used in pharmacological research still outnumber females by a 5 to 1 ratio.
- •Heart disease is the leading cause of death in women and yet only one-third of participants in those clinical trials are female. (In addition, women’s symptoms of heart attacks are generally different than those reported by men and are often overlooked because they are categorized as “atypical”).