Thought healthcare couldn’t get worse for women? Oh, it can. And this goes all the way back to the lab.
Here is a deeply unsettling thought: Much of what modern medicine knows about the human body was learned without adequately studying half of the population.
For decades, researchers treated men as the default — and women as, well, complicated. Too hormonal. Too unpredictable. Too much of a headache. So, women were excluded from drug trials, overlooked in laboratory research or included without researchers bothering to ask the very obvious question: Hey, do women respond differently?
Spoiler alert: Sometimes, yes.
And those decisions didn’t stay neatly tucked away in the laboratory. They helped shape which symptoms doctors recognize, how medications are dosed, which treatments get studied (and funded) and ultimately, the care women receive (or don’t).
Things have improved. Women are now included in far more research than they once were. But … here’s the catch: putting women in a study isn’t the same as studying women.
Researchers still don’t always analyze whether the results differ by sex — even though our bodies, risks and responses to disease and treatments can.
It got us curious about women in medical research. So, we went digging. And some of the facts we uncovered made us stop and say, Wait, Seriously?
These are eight facts about women in medical research that are downright insane, infuriating and, in some cases, just unbelievable. (Although they are 100% real.)
Read them. Share them in your group chat. Because apparently, we need to make sure that the medical industry actually studies us.
1. 1993: The Year Women Were Finally Required in Medical Research.
1993. That is the year the National Institutes of Health (NIH) required researchers to include women in medical studies. That’s the same year Bill Clinton became president. Let that sink in.
To its credit, the NIH did begin encouraging this move in 1986. But “encouraging” is not the same as “requiring.”
It took the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993 to make inclusion of women a legal requirement for NIH-funded clinical research. For Phase III clinical trials, the law also required studies to be designed and conducted in a way that allowed researchers to assess whether an intervention affected women differently than men.
2. 2016: The Year Researchers Finally Had to Account for Sex.
The 1993 law helped get women into human clinical research. But it did not apply to the basic and preclinical research that happens before those trials. Meaning, researchers continued to rely heavily on male animals and cells.
That did not change until 2016, when the NIH’s Sex as a Biological Variable policy, required researchers studying humans or vertebrate animals to explain how sex would factor into research — or justify studying only one sex.
In other words: Getting women into clinical trials was one battle. Getting researchers to study sex differences in the first place was another.
3. Women Are Missing From Research on Their No. 1 Killer
The math ain’t mathing.
A 2020 analysis of 740 cardiovascular trials completed between 2010 and 2017 included 862,652 adults. Only 38.2% were women.
Meanwhile, cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death for U.S. women. Women carry an enormous share of the disease burden, yet the evidence guiding their heart care has disproportionately come from studying men.
4. Two-Thirds of Alzheimer’s Patients Are Women. The Funding? Just 12%.
Women make up nearly two-thirds of Americans living with Alzheimer’s. You’d think research spending would reflect that reality. It doesn’t even come close.
And that’s according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
A WHAM analysis of NIH spending found that in 2019, just 12% — $280 million of the agency’s $2.4 billion Alzheimer’s research budget — went to projects focused specifically on women.
And here’s the kicker: That 12% isn’t just a snapshot. The latest data shows it remained unchained through 2025. The times they aren’t a changin’.
5. 27 Sex Drugs for Men. Just 2 for Women.
It’s not a typo. We wish it was.
When Flow Space examined the disparity in 2024, men had 26 FDA-approved sexual health drugs compared with only two for women. The subsequent approval of Vybrique, an oral-film treatment for erectile dysfunction, widened the gap to 27 versus 2.
It is not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison. Many of the drugs for men address erectile dysfunction, while the two for women treat acquired, generalized hypoactive sexual desire disorder. Still, 27 to 2 sends a clear message about whose sexual health needs are being prioritized and funded. Hint: It’s not women.
6. Women Are Half the Population But Get Less than 9% of Medical Funding.
Women are half the population. Surely women’s health gets a healthy slice of the nation’s medical research funding, right?
Not. Even. Close.
A congressionally mandated National Academies analysis found that just 8.8% of NIH grant spending from 2013 through 2023 focused on women’s health research.
And that sliver got even smaller: It fell from 9.7% in 2013 to 7.9% in 2023 — even as the NIH’s overall grant funding grew.
7. The FDA Tried Keeping Women Out of Early Drug Trials.
Women weren’t just overlooked in medical research. For years, the government actually told researchers to leave them out.
In 1977, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advised researchers to exclude women of childbearing potential from Phase I and early Phase II drug trials — even women who used contraception, were single or had husbands who had undergone vasectomies.
And this is according to the NIH!
The guidance wasn’t revoked until 1993 — a 16-year stretch in which women were routinely left out of early safety and dosing research.
8. Black Women Face the Highest Heart Risk. They’re Barely in the Trials.
For Black women, the research gap is even more alarming.
Nearly 60% of Black women ages 20 and older have cardiovascular disease, and they face the highest prevalence — and highest risk of dying from it — among women of other racial and ethnic groups, according to the American Heart Association.
Yet a 2022 review of representation in research revealed Black women made up just 3.2% of women enrolled in global cardiovascular drug trials.
If the women at greatest risk barely make it into the research, who exactly are we studying? It’s a question we need to start asking, loudly.