I won’t pretend to see the whole picture here but it sounds like we’re talking about 7% female specific data vs everything else. Most of the remaining data may be non gender specific.
To present this as 7% female and 93% male is disingenuous.
As a counterpoint, breast cancer research (an issue predominantly affecting women) recieves far more funding than prostate cancer research.
Not true. Most studies nowadays include male & female participants - and more research focuses on exclusively female than exclusively male issues
The real bias is against normal human beings. Nursing/medical students and medical professionals are vastly overrepresented amongst study participants - and young people. These groups of people are much healthier than the average human being. Steps have been taken to address this too, but it is slow going.
more than likely medical professionals are more likely to ignore women, when they present symptoms of a disease, they are often balked, or dismissed as attention seeking behaviour. heart disease tends to be ignored in women in some cases.
medical science is less clear on biasing against woman or men. they might focus on certain gender groups for different diseases, like MS is more likely to occur in women, but in men its more severe. some cancers are more likely in men than woman. like P.Dermatitis is more common in women than in men, but some diseases are equally affecting both genders.
also for cancers, they might ignore both genders if you’re “too young” for it.
the standard baseline is almost always a typical male body
luckily this is not really true anymore.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/biomedical-research-sex-male-female-animal-human-studies
Couldn’t open the source link, unfortunately. So what’s the percentage of women specific health issues? And what % of funding goes to health issues that only impact men?
incredibly misleading. piss off with your bullshit
I don’t doubt that women are underrepresented in medical research, but at the same time I suspect most medical research targets issues that affect both men and women, since that is true of most medical issues. The 7% statistic would be more impactful if we could compare it to the percentage of medical research focused on medical issues specific to men.
Edit: after further consideration, my initial take here isn’t great either, because women face more medical issues specific to their gender. I still think the 7% statistic is a little misleading.
Yep, that 7% doesn’t mean the rest is going to research on men specific health, it means that 7% is for women health, an unknown % is for men health and the rest is for human health in general (which is logically the biggest %).
Issues that affect both women and men still often tend to affect both in different ways – but the majority of medical research tends to just take what works for the standard male body and apply that to everyone regardless of sex instead of investigating sex-specific effects and tailoring solutions around that
Do you have sources for this claim? Every non-gender specific (i.e. gynecology, prostates, etc.) medical study I have ever read has made it clear that they try to sample as close to an even number of men and women as possible.
I’m making this claim from an American standpoint: A famous example is that fewer girls and women are diagnosed with autism, and those that have been are either profoundly autistic or have had to educate their doctors. Girls are usually socialized differently than boys, so some of the criteria for autism just aren’t a good fit
that’s a clinical bias, the person above was asking about a research bias.
edit:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/biomedical-research-sex-male-female-animal-human-studies
as of 2019:
Behavioral research was the most inclusive, with both sexes in 81 percent of studies.
I want to know where you think clinical criteria come from
Edit: your article describes a study that found research to be dominated by male biology when it was published 2011. This article found a nine year average delay in updating clinical guidelines. People who were in university to be a doctor within the last ten years are likely still operating on older research, unless they have taken the time to stay up to date.
I have a year left on my BS in Biology. There is so much new research coming out that I read, that I know my classmates don’t have the time for. So what we are taught from textbooks is what they learn, and this is a large part of where they get their biases from
clinical bias is not necessarily from the criteria. often the clinician is the one introducing the bias all on their own.
That’s fair! From the same perspective, there are significant issues with the diagnosis and treatment of disorders like ADHD and Autism, especially in relation to gender.
But research into that is actively happening, and those issues are specifically recognized and being tackled. Autism in particular was heavily impacted by genuine differences in presentation that naturally reduce the likelihood of social recognition (and therefore reduce the social pressure toward diagnosis):
Studies show that autistic women and female-presenting people have better social awareness, are more likely to engage in reciprocal conversation, have more social motivation for friendships, participate in more group activities, use more nonverbal gestures and pragmatic language, have fewer repetitive/restrictive behaviors, and have more friends than autistic men and male-presenting individuals (Hsiao et al., 2013; Hiller et al., 2014; Rynkiewicz et al., 2016; Parish-Morris et al., 2017; Sedgewick et al., 2016; Dean et al., 2017; Wilson et al., 2016).
https://autism.org/women-in-autism/#gender-bias
Don’t get me wrong, historical research was terrible. And, to this day misdiagnosis and undertreatment is rampant. Women are less likely to receive adequate treatment for pain and are more likely to face delays in various diagnoses, due to almost entirely social influences like male doctors just not believing their patients. Mental health and psychiatric disorders in particular are obviously heavily impacted by that.
But we also only know those things because of modern research. Studies need representational sampling to get through any IRB, and so the majority of medical research starts with men and women from the beginning, reports any differences in the results, and generally keeps trying until it reaches positive clinical outcomes for both.
In the case of Autism, it was recognized that there was a 4:1 men:women diagnostic ratio, and they kept looking at that number until they found possible explanations why.
At the very least I think that the much larger issue is currently on the other end of the equation - if we could get those positive clinical outcomes actually delivered clinically, rather than theoretically.
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“In 2020, only 1% of funding for healthcare research and innovation (beyond oncology) was invested in women’s health.”
That 7% is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting. You don’t even need specific numbers to see how wacky the logic is: who here really believes that 93% of gynecological research is conducted on men? Research into ovarian cancer? Development into drugs for preeclampsia?
If you were I’m going with this… yes, women are massively under represented in medical research that applies to both men and women, and there are problems with that too, such as major differences between cardiovascular issues in men and women. Most people, including doctors and nurses, would not recognize the symptoms of a heart attack in a woman unless they were specifically looking for them.
93% of gynecological research is conducted on men? Research into ovarian cancer? Development into drugs for preeclampsia?
That’s not what that means at all. It means gynecological research + research into other issues that only affect female physiology only accounts of 7% of all medical research. The other 93% is either focused on general or male-specific issues (and conducted mostly on men).
Is it just medical research? It just says research in general. I’m not making a claim either way, but agree it’s worded very poorly.
Yes, I know what it means. That’s why the headline is bit misleading.
The headline is of course misleading, but not really for the reasons you pointed out. Nobody is going to read that headline and think it means 93% of gynecological research is conducted on men. Some people might read it and think it means 93% of medical research overall is conducted on men, though.
If you read the linked source, it says 7% is research that is aimed at issues that EXCLUSIVELY affect women.
Yep so people need to understand that it doesn’t mean that 93% goes to men specific issues.
That sounds fine. How much funding should go to exclusively womens issues?
How much funding is on male only health issues? We need something to compare because that stat alone is useless.
It honestly strikes me as high.
I would expect that women-exclusive or male-exclusive issues would be less than 7% of all issues.
Buddy, you have no idea how many medical issues happen doing to pregnancy and child birth alone. It’s staggering.
Enlighten us then, how many issue happen between pregnancy and child birth?
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I think medical research is also biased against healthier people. The “standard baseline… male body” isn’t particularly healthy, especially in older ages. People just don’t take very good care of themselves, they eat crappy food, and don’t exercise. I’m thinking specifically of high LDL cholesterol, and statins being universally shoved at us to bring it down. But, recent research shows that high LDL cholesterol alone, in an otherwise quite healthy person, may not be the risk to plaque build up it’s assumed to be. Because, most of the research is done on less healthy, “standard baseline… males.”
That’s wild considering most men never go to the doctors willingly
Yes, but consider that there was likely a financial incentive to be part of the trials.
