Females are still routinely left out of biomedical research — and ignored in analyses of data
If you think biomedical scientists are doing a better job studying both biological sexes in their experiments than they used to, you’d be half right, a new study says.
Researchers decided to revisit a study conducted 10 years ago that found females were excluded from most biomedical research based on fears of female hormonal variation complicating the findings. To see if that practice persisted after the government issued new research guidelines, the team from Northwestern University and Smith College — including a co-author of the original study — examined more than 700 scientific journal articles from nine fields published in 2019. They looked to see how well males and females were represented as subjects in research, from animals in lab experiments to people in clinical trials. Then they checked whether scientists discussed results for each sex in scholarly publications describing the work.
