Despite accounting for more than half of the population, women’s health is severely under-researched. Men’s bodies received total attention from the medical world, while women were pushed to the side. It was largely assumed that women’s bodies worked the same as men’s, and therefore, there was no need to waste resources on clinical research into how drugs and medications affect women.
Specifically, women are underrepresented in medical trials, even in recent years. In 1977, the FDA banned “women of reproductive potential” without life-threatening conditions from participating in Phase one and two clinical trials because of a previous trial that tested thalidomide on pregnant women and caused birth defects. The new policy included practically all premenopausal women, therefore practically barring all women from clinical trials, reducing the data on the interaction between women and various drugs. This lack of research has resulted in women experiencing unexpected effects at nearly twice the rate of men. Women only account for 40% of participants in clinical trials in 2019, with black women accounting for even less. Surprisingly, this disparity extends beyond the human race to even animal species. Male animals were chosen to be studied over their female counterparts due to claims of increased cost for differences in care. Many of these decisions were defended by claims of unreliability due to female hormones, stating that the results may not apply to the general population due to their “emotional nature”.
This blatant sexism has caused women to be underdiagnosed, undertreated, and even given the wrong treatment at times. Women present differently from men for many diseases and conditions. In heart attacks, women’s symptoms can be more subtle than men’s, and without studies that include women, their treatment can be delayed or prevented. Chloe Bird, a professor at Pardee RAND Graduate School, says, “Cardiovascular disease, for example, is the number one killer of women in the USA, but only about a third of participants in clinical trials for new treatments for cardiovascular disease are female.” There is a desperate need for an increase in funding and outreach in clinical studies for various diseases and conditions.
Interestingly, an increase in attention for studies that research the presentation of diseases in women would present an opportunity for investors to make a profit while supporting the increase in knowledge of women’s struggles. This would add massive amounts of money to the United States economy and could even result in the creation of new treatments and cures. Beyond conditions that affect both women and men, those that affect only women have considerably less research than those that affect only men. Specifically, for diseases that have treatments but not cures and still result in suffering and pain, there is no movement for further investigation. The future needs to see an improvement in the study of women’s bodies and inclusion in clinical trials, or else more than 50% of the population will continue to suffer from wrong and late diagnosis.
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