Unbalanced Studies: More funding must be invested in studying women’s health 

Females have outnumbered males in the U.S. since 1946, according to the United States Census Bureau.

Despite this, there are continuous and disturbing gender inequities in medical research, leading to underrepresentation of women in clinical trials and bias in understanding women's health needs.

The main issue is that there’s no plan to improve this bias. Less than 8% of the National Institute of Health grant budget for fiscal year 2023 was allocated to women’s health research. NIH doesn’t separately calculate or publish a category for men’s health research, this is because most other research is men’s health. Conditions that uniquely affect women remain “critically understudied.” according to the National Library of Medicine. 

In 1977, the FDA recommended excluding women of childbearing age, 15-49 years old from early clinical trials, according to the World Health Association. The goal was to protect potential pregnancies, but instead it led to a broad exclusion of women in health studies.

This was entirely unnecessary. And the only reason for it was because researchers wanted simpler data, and claimed males were more “controlled.”

This didn’t change until 1993 when the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993 mandated that women must be included in NIH-funded clinical research.

Researchers claim they “don’t know” the pregnancy risk, and therefore exclude any women that could get pregnant, according to the National Library of Medicine. 

And this isn’t even close to everything. Women remain underrepresented in clinical trials across multiple specialties, specifically in cardiology, oncology — the leading causes of death among women — and stroke research, according to the NLM.

And when women have to make treatment decisions, they only have two, bad options. Rely on research conducted primarily on men, for which dosing and metabolism issues exist, or rely on lower-quality observation data on women, rather than rigorous clinical trials.

And who gets to be a part of and receive quality data from these clinical trials? Men. 

Consider endometriosis, a condition exclusive to women in which cells similar to the lining of a uterus grow outside of the uterus.  

This condition has a disturbingly low awareness among healthcare professionals and policymakers. Approximately 65% of women are initially misdiagnosed, according to the NIM. Women experience delays of diagnosis, averaging five to 12 years after their first symptoms arise, and the average patient sees seven physicians before endometriosis is properly diagnosed. 

If more research money was allocated, women wouldn't have to wait a decade for basic health issues to be resolved.

Societal normalization of women’s pain and stigma around menstrual issues, combined with the lack of medical prioritization on women's health research, is partly to blame.

In fact, according to Blueprint to Close the Women’s Health Gap, between 2019 and 2023, less than 1% of healthcare research and development funding was directed to female-specific medical problems. 

Consider menstruation and menopause, which affect 100% of females. Until 2023, no study had ever been published testing period products — tampons, pads, discs, cups — using human blood. Early tampons were tested with blue-saline solution — a shortcut instead of using real blood, because women’s bodies are apparently optional. 

This lack of research would never happen for health issues exclusive to men. 

Inequities persist beyond female-specific health concerns. Take cardiovascular research for example. Women make up 50% of those affected by cardiovascular disease, but only represent 38% of patients in clinical trials, according to the NLM.  

Women make up 51% of heart disease deaths, greater than males 49%. 

Consider life-threatening conditions such as HIV-1, a sexually transmitted infection. A treatment medication — Biktarvy — was initially approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2018, according to Gilead. 

However, it wasn’t until 2024 that Biktarvy was updated to treat women with HIV who are pregnant.

The only reason for this delayed approval is the fact that pregnant people aren't usually studied until later on. This is common across all medical studies using a "protection-by-exclusion" mentality, which systematically excludes pregnant women without scientific justification, according to the NLM.

Female health conditions receive little funding compared to their disease burden, and the result is extrapolation. Women differ from men in body size, cardiac chamber dimension, and responses to treatments.

Every patient deserves treatments that are specific to their personal needs, especially women.

Ineffective policies and unresolved promises aren't the solution, they only make the problem worse. The government and NIH must raise awareness on the prevalence of the issue and allocate more funding towards women's health research.

The funding discrepancies bleed into health issues for both men and women. So don’t think that males getting the majority of the research is helping anyone.