The healthcare profession has been promising to increase the number of women included in clinical trials for decades. To be blunt, this has not happened. Women are still woefully underrepresented in virtually all clinical trials. Even the majority of lab mice are male.

Not only do researchers fail to include enough women in clinical trials, they often don’t look for differences between how men and women respond to treatments.
The results of this neglect are tragic:
- Women are twice as likely as men to die from heart attacks.
- When a nonsmoker dies of lung cancer, it’s twice as likely to be a woman as a man.
- Women suffer more than men from Alzheimer’s and autoimmune disease.
Despite this, the research into these conditions, and many more, generally fails to examine women as a separate population from men. It’s even less likely to look at disparities affecting women of color – why, for instance, Black women are nearly three times more likely to die in pregnancy than white women are.
Read More