15 June 2019 | New Scientist | 23opportunities afforded to men
and women is reflected in health
outcomes. Many of the challenges
women face are because their
rights aren’t protected, and
restrictive gender norms are
woven into the fabric of health
systems and research.
These latest interventions
should all be welcomed, but will
they achieve anything? After all,
we have known about many of
these problems for decades, yet
progress remains achingly slow.
The US National Institute for
Health (NIH) now mandates
the inclusion of females in the
research it funds, but compliance
remains patchy. As Shanksy points
out, the NIH doesn’t explicitly
dictate how to incorporate both
sexes into experimental designs.
Too often, researchers conduct
studies in men first and only
progress to including women if
they find something interesting,
which, once again, positions
men as a standard from which
women deviate.
We need better, stronger and
more well-enforced regulation.
The truth is that, because of the
need to test at different stages of
the menstrual cycle, it probably is
more expensive to include women
in clinical trials. But we must
ask ourselves a simple question.
What do we care about more:
saving money or saving lives? ❚Culture
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JOS
IE^ F
OR
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CommentEnd medical gender bias
Research on new treatments is skewed towards male subjects –
with huge effects on women’s health, says Caroline Criado-PerezI
N 2016, a group of researchers
in Canada released a paper
that completely upended the
gold standard for survivorship
of heart disease. For years, study
after study had shown that mice
have a better chance of surviving
a heart attack that hits during
the day. This study found the
opposite. How come?
The answer turned out to
be simple. All the previous –
implicitly gender-neutral –
mice had been male. These
new mice were female.
It is perhaps no coincidence
that women have lower survival
rates for heart attacks than men.
That sex matters is a message that
has been repeated by biomedicalresearchers for decades. The past
couple of weeks have seen three
further calls for researchers to
stop using males as the default
sex in their work.
Writing in the journal Science,
neuroscientist Rebecca Shansky
at Northeastern University in
Boston denounced the underlying
premise that hormonal activity
makes female bodies and brains
too variable to be good research
subjects. This assumption wasn’t
even tested until 2014, when a
meta-analysis of almost 300
studies found that male mice
were, in fact, more variable than
female mice on certain markers.
Over-reliance on male data goes
beyond animal research, too. As science journalist Apoorva
Mandavilli highlighted in
The New York Times, men far
outnumber women in HIV
trials. This is despite the fact that
women make up the majority
of those with HIV, and that the
virus is the leading cause of death
among women of reproductive
age worldwide. We know that
men and women react differently
to the virus, probably because
male and female immune systems
are different.
As a series of articles just
published by The Lancet on
“Gender Equality, Norms and
Health” makes plain, this
isn’t just about biology. The
disparity between the roles andCulture columnist
Simon Ings tackles
king-size kaiju in the
new Godzilla flick p32Caroline Criado-Perez is
author of Invisible Women:
Exposing data bias in a
world designed for men