image by: DES Daughter

HWN Suggests

Women in science – global study finds presence without power

Academia isn’t strong on gender equality. Women are under-represented throughout, in the research workforce and even more so as leaders in scientific organisations. This is true for science academies (prestigious bodies within national science systems) and scientific unions (international organisations representing disciplinary communities). Women today make up nearly a third of the global research workforce. According to Unesco, they accounted for 31.1% of researchers worldwide in 2022 – up from 29.4% in 2012. Women are particularly underrepresented in engineering and technology (one quarter or less), while gender balance is largely achieved in the social sciences and humanities.

read full article

Featured

 Despite decades of promises, health research still overlooks women

Women are underrepresented in clinical trials, and even lab mice are predominantly male – and the effects show up in almost every aspect of human health

 Women Are Still Under-Represented in Medical Research. Here's Where the Gender Gap Is Most Pronounced

Historically, medical research has been male-dominated in terms of subjects as well as researchers, even though women make up half of the world’s population. As a result of this gender bias, insights into various diseases and findings about medications have often been extrapolated from men and applied to women. But women aren’t just smaller men. Women’s bodies are decidedly different from men’s, with unique organs, genes, hormones, and other key differences.

Articles of Interest

Medical Myths About Gender Roles Go Back to Ancient Greece. Women Are Still Paying the Price Today

Gender difference is intimately stitched into the fabric of humanness. At every stage in its long history, medicine has absorbed and enforced socially constructed gender divisions. These divisions have traditionally ascribed power and dominance to men. Historically, women have been subordinated in politics, wealth and education. Modern scientific medicine, as it has evolved over the centuries as a profession, an institution and a discipline, has flourished in these exact conditions. Male dominance—and with it the superiority of the male body—was cemented into medicine’s very foundations, laid down in ancient Greece.

Science needs to be more inclusive and women are making it happen

Having more women, people of color, LGBTQIA individuals, and scientists of other marginalized identities won’t magically solve these problems overnight. But it’s a goal worth working for nonetheless, simply because more people, with various backgrounds and insights, expand the types of questions that get asked and the solutions that come out of scientific inquiry.

The female problem: how male bias in medical trials ruined women's health

Centuries of female exclusion has meant women’s diseases are often missed, misdiagnosed or remain a total mystery.

History of Women’s Participation in Clinical Research

Policies that encourage the inclusion of women in research originated during the women’s health movement, which emerged as part of the women’s movement. During the 1970s, few women worked in either medicine or science, and many women believed that women’s health needs were a low priority in the scientific and medical fields.

Is Medical Research Sexist? The Government Says Scientists Have to Start Using More Female Lab Mice to Balance the Scales

We all see the reports about how X medicine (or what have you) seemed to impact Y animal subjects. But it seems that in 1,200 neuroscience papers from top journals—published in the 2011 and 2012 time period—only 42 percent reported the sex of the animals used. And when sex was reported, females were included about 24 percent of the time.

Is there still a gender gap in medical research?

When you go to the doctor's office, your doctor has to figure out which treatment is best for you. Physicians rely on medical research and clinical trials to make sure those treatments are safe and effective. But that research has not always been inclusive, which impacts patient care. Women and people of color were only required to be included in medical trials funded by the NIH starting in 1993. Now, studies are more inclusive – but how we study sex and gender in research is still controversial.

Sex Inequalities in Medical Research: A Systematic Scoping Review of the Literature

Historically, medical studies have excluded female participants and research data have been collected from males and generalized to females. The gender gap in medical research, alongside overarching misogyny, results in real-life disadvantages for female patients.

Women’s experiences are forgotten in research on childbirth and breastfeeding

Doctors rarely take into account patients’ own understanding of their experiences, their anxiety or their ability to make decisions about their care. It’s time for medicine to treat these lived experiences as valuable evidence alongside other scientific considerations.

Resources

500 Women Scientists

500 Women Scientists is a grassroots organization started by four women who met in graduate school at CU Boulder and who maintained friendships and collaborations after jobs and life took them away from Boulder. Immediately following the November 2016 election, we published an open letter re-affirming our commitment to speak up for science and for marginalized communities in science

Scientists are finally studying women’s bodies. This is what we’re learning.

Women’s health concerns are dismissed more and studied less. But researchers are beginning to fill in those gaps—from menstruation to menopause