Why science has failed women (and how we can change it right now)

Source Summary

As a predoctoral researcher, I study the aging of hematopoietic stem cells – the cells responsible for regenerating all our blood throughout our lives–. A few years ago, while observing these cells under the microscope, I noticed some strange differences between my samples. They were supposed to behave identically, as they all came from donors of the same age, but this was not the case. I remember a thought came to my mind: "Are these donors of the same sex?" . Until that moment, I had never asked myself this question. When I started reading the scientific literature, I realized this wasn't just my blind spot. For centuries, both basic research and modern medicine have operated under the premise of the "standard human": the Reference Man. This was not done as a conspiracy theory to exclude women from research, but out of a combination of convenience and practicality. Early medical researchers used military records of healthy soldiers as a baseline; furthermore, scientists actively avoided studying female subjects, claiming that fluctuations in menstrual hormones would distort the data. This bias was so profound that, even in basic research, female mice were systematically excluded.