“sufficient to provide for valid analysis of whether the variables being studied in the trial affect women or members of minority groups, as the case may be, differently than other subjects in the trial.” The hope was that by doing so, scientific research would better reflect and understand how males and females functioned biologically and how they differed with respect to medical conditions.
This transformation did not happen, though, as science did not change its belief that women were the same as men except for our reproductive capabilities. Through continuous advocacy and research discoveries, it was finally determined that it mattered. The NIH recognized the full importance of sex as a basic variable to research in 2016, implementing a new — that required SABV to “be factored into research designs, analyses and reporting in vertebrate animal and human studies.
Yet, despite these steps and the nearly 30 years of effort by women’s health advocates, there remains a glaringly persistent funding disparity in medical conditions affecting women most. In fact,We must insist that the NIH and the entire medical community do better than that. Although medicine and science have long treated them otherwise, men and women — and the illnesses and conditions they experience — are not the same.