The problematic gender gap in medical knowledge

In our previous blog post, we discussed how thalidomide was casually prescribed to pregnant Canadian, Australian, European and African women in the late 1950s and early 1960s, even though testing on rats had shown a negative impact on their offspring. In humans, the impact was also negative and lots of babies ended up being born with severe deformities.

While this led to more stringent drug regulations in the US, it also ended up leading to the exclusion of ‘women of childbearing potential’ from clinical trials in 1977. This clinical trial guideline was meant to protect unborn babies, but it resulted in a massive lack of information on the impact of drugs on women. In 1993, the FDA reversed the guideline and officially mandated the inclusion of women in clinical trials (unless, of course, the condition that is being researched only affects men).

But at that point, a lot of damage had already been done to women’s healthcare. It turned out that the lack of research and information on women had caused women to experience side effects from drugs and medical interventions twice as much as men. Women also suffered more complications from hip replacement surgeries, because no one had taken the physical differences between men and women in consideration during clinical trials to test the replacement hips. And in 1999, the medical field came to the shocking conclusion that women experience different symptoms of heart disease than men, although it’s the leading cause of death in the United States for both men and women.

While being a woman of childbearing potential is currently not an exclusion criterion for participation in a clinical trial anymore, provided that the woman agrees to use highly effective methods of contraception to reduce the risk of pregnancy to a minimum, women are still largely underrepresented in clinical trials. This is especially true for women of color, so there is still a long way to go.