It's 2014: Isn't It About Time We Fix Gender Bias in Studies?

It's 2014: Isn't It About Time We Fix Gender Bias in Studies?

Women are underrepresented in scientific research, but not for long.

We talk about gender inequality in terms of salary, leadership, opportunity, and more—but what about in scientific research? It turns out that clinical trials often use single-sex groups (of men) to cut down on variability between subjects. But that means that the effects of new drugs and treatments might not be tested on women, or at least not on enough women.

Luckily, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has decided to do something about it. They announced last week that they have invested $10.1 million in grants to 82 scientists to explore the effects of gender in clinical studies. The investment encourages researchers to study more females in both human and animal trials and it reinforces the importance of eliminating gender bias in clinical studies. "By making strategic investments that incorporate sex into existing funded studies, we are paving the way for researchers to better understand when sex matters in their research," said James M. Anderson, M.D., Ph.D., director of the NIH Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives in a recent press release.

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How did this disparity happen in the first place? According to Janine Austin Clayton, M.D., NIH Associate Director of Research on Women's Health, there is actually some reasoning behind it. "One big reason is because female animals, like women, have a hormonal cycle, called the estrus cycle," she says. "For a long time, scientists thought that including females introduced a high level of variability in experiments, and would make experiments too difficult, and so they just used male animals. We know more now."

But while there are some diseases that only happen to men (like prostate cancer) or women (like ovarian cancer), almost all afflictions can benefit from both genders being studied. Furthermore, it's kind of scary to not have more women counted, especially when you consider that many of the conditions being studied are more common in women or present with different symptoms in women.

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"Diagnoses for anxiety and depression are more than twice as common in women than in men, but fewer than forty-five percent of animal studies into these disorders used females," says Clayton. "Women have more strokes than men, with poorer functional outcomes, but only thirty-eight percent of animal studies into strokes used females."

Hopefully, this new investment will lead to more comprehensive research that will benefit both men and women equally. "When I was in medical school, I was always taught about the effect that treatments would have in a 70 kg man," says Clayton. "But I'm not a 70 kg man. How does this treatment work in me?" Fortunately, it's finally time to find out.

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