30 Years After Gender Inclusion in Research. What's changed?
In 1993, the US Congress created policy mandating that women and minorities be included in government-funded research.
Since then, women still remain underrepresented in research, leading to a limited understanding of how women experience disease and the development of effective treatments.
"Failure to study medications and other interventions in a broad sampling of women has contributed to women experiencing adverse effects from medications at twice the rate of men."
Recent data shows that approximately only 40% of clinical trials participants for key issues are women. This is even less for women of colour. The MRCT Center published an article in 2022 pointing out that often clinical trial data do not report the intersection of biological sex and race, and that some systematic reviews of clinical trials that report such information show significant underrepresentation of women of colour.
Though some progress has been made since the late policy introduction in 1993, there is still much improvement needed to fully understand and properly treat diseases to reach equity between men and women.
“It’s important to study women to find out how to care for [51%] of the population. We are the majority of the population. So, although women are special, we are not a ‘special population." (Martha Gulati, MD)
