Feminism

I knew this and it's still infuriating.

They glossed past it, but the idea that men are the default human and women are extra has been around for centuries(at least.) It doesn't make it any easier to know that medical funding still largely excludes the female experience with all we know today.

Another common bias was disproved when early psychological studies, at least a hundred years ago, sought to understand if women truly were more emotional and less rational than men. Even that old research found no disparity between genders. This is important because it remains a common bias in medical research that women are more emotional and likely to misrepresent their symptoms, no matter how many studies have come out since then that show the opposite is true. It remains part of the subtle drive to keep women out of medical trials and impacts the kind of care and attention we recieve.

At the risk of infuriating people, it's complicated. Most of the article focuses on cardiovascular disease. It is the number one killer of women, as it for men. But men have an elevated risk over women, and develop CVD 10 years earlier.

Lumping CVD research into a single bucket isn't super helpful. A lot of it will be done in vitro and focused on molecular mechanisms. These studies are essentially sexless and it's not clear to me if the funding calculations were limited to human, whole organism, or anything at all. Were they comparing funding targeted specifically to women against a denominator that included test tube research? I can't tell, but maybe I missed it on a quick read.

Research also covers different areas: mechanisms, treatment options and outcomes, cost, patient factors such as access to treatment, acceptability of treatment, impact of disease on life factors and a million other things. Some of these require a sex or gender segmentation. Some don't. Some studies will use a convenience sample i.e. everyone who showed up to a hospital, some will have screening criteria. This not a case of comparing apples to oranges, but rather comparing apples to poodles and a growing sense of doom for an upcoming exam. They are just not relatable in the aggregate.

No discussion of this sort can take place without a reference to Simpson's Paradox .

So I completely agree that women need to be included in CVD research. I think the article is being deliberately inflammatory and ignoring critical details on how it is already being done, and where improvement is most needed.

I wonder about some of the facts. Whilst I do not dispute that there are differences, there are some points here that seem dishonest. For example there is a number cited that roughly 9% of resources or whatever is directed at women, despite them making up half the population. This number is women-only, right? But there is a point earlier that specifies that, at least in the US, research should in general include both men and women.

Does anyone have any numbers percentages that relate to shared research as well as mamen-only? I asked chatgpt and all it could find was some UK study between 2000 and 2013 on cancer research:

• Women-specific: 8.4%
• Men-specific: 6.0%
• Gender-agnostic/non-sex-specific: 85.6%

On the one hand there seems to arguments about a more equal distribution of resources, which I agree with, but on the other hand the numbers seem to compare women-only investments to everything else. That such numbers are small does not mean that the men-only percentages are large. It would be more interesting to compare these numbers. Showing only one of them, feels a little disingenuous.

It feels I little unclear whether the author thinks the distribution should be equal or whether or not it should reflect problem groups. What's more we do not see any numbers showing whether or not one of them is being favoured over the other.