Gender Bias in Medical Research
By Sanjana PB
Women outnumber men, women outlive men. Women also use more healthcare services than men. Nevertheless, there are yawning chasms of missing information about women’s healthcare because the vast majority of medical research is done on male subjects – even most research on laboratory rats involves males only (HeinOnline, 2024).
Thus, the evidence basis of medicine may be fundamentally flawed due to the ongoing failure of research tools to include sex differences in study design and analysis (Holdcroft, 2007). This methodology maintains a reporting bias and often leads to formulating guidelines and conclusions based on the study of one sex, generalizing them, and applying them to both sexes. Thus, one of the sexes is disadvantaged due to a lack of medical protocols that have been guaranteed to work on other people that belong to the same sex.
There is also evidence that women, for no apparent medical reason, are not offered the same treatment as men. Many studies show that women are less likely than men to receive more advanced diagnostic and therapeutic interventions (Hamberg, 2008). This phenomenon clearly indicates the prevalence of gender bias in the healthcare and medicine field.
Further bias can be seen in how women are excluded from studies and clinical trials even when the disease predominantly affects more women than men. For instance, research funding for studying Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) in men is far greater than for women (Holdcroft, 2007) although a majority of women are at risk for this disease.
The persistent exclusion of pregnant women in clinical trials is another significantly ignored problem in the medical research field. Other forms of gender bias are seen in recruitment into clinical trials, and the reporting of gender-related data.
Gender bias, in a crucial field such as medicine, has extremely unfavorable implications in the treatment of both male and female patients. Gender blindness, stereotyped preconceptions, and exaggeration of observed sex and gender differences between men and women have been identified as key causes that lead to gender bias (Hamberg, 2008). It is important to dismantle gender discrimination as a society, to help a larger cause in the medical field.
Works Cited
Hamberg, K. (2008). Gender Bias in Medicine. Women S Health, 4(3), 237–243. https://doi.org/10.2217/17455057.4.3.237
HeinOnline. (2024, November 13). About - HeinOnline. https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/worts15&div=14&id=&page=
Holdcroft, A. (2007). Gender bias in research: how does it affect evidence based medicine? Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 100(1), 2–3. https://doi.org/10.1177/014107680710000102