Gender Bias in Health Research Leads to Unintended Consequences

In 2011, researchers from Smith College and the University of California, Berkeley compiled data from scientific research on mammals in ten fields, including neuroscience, pharmacology, and physiology.

They discovered a missing variable in the great majority of this animal research, which often leads to clinical trials in humans.

That missing variable? Women.

Researchers found gender bias in eight of the 10 fields they studied, most prominently in neuroscience, where single-sex studies with males outnumbered those with females 5.5 to 1. 

This week, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) introduced a new grant program to combat gender bias in health research. Emily Goard Jacobs is an Instructor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Research Associate Psychologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

She tells The Takeaway's John Hockenberry why the NIH program is so crucial to ensure quality health care for women and men.