Hey, NIH! Your sexism is showing.
Today, the NIH spends proportionally LESS studying women's health than in 2013. A damning new study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, maps it out. With receipts.
When I saw the chart below, on page 34 of “A New Vision for Women's Health Research: Transformative Change at the National Institutes of Health”—a new and damning 482-page report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine—I had to double back and check the numbers again. Wait, what? We’re spending proportionally less on women’s health today than we did…in 2013?
How is that even possible?
In 2013, I was diagnosed with DCIS then lost my health insurance, pre-Obamacare, to a job loss followed by administrative snafu. That’s when I first started writing about the absurdities of our healthcare system. I was also appalled, back then—after already losing my uterus to adenomyosis in 2012—to learn that the NIH was not studying diseases like mine, which are specific to women’s bodies, at all. Nor were they disaggregating their data so that, you know, figuring out how much of a drug is either useful or lethal to a female body, as opposed to a male body, might be considered worthy of scientific inquiry.
Back then, the NIH appropriated only 9.7% of their research dollars to the study of women’s bodies. A paltry, embarrassing, and dangerous sum, considering 51% of us are female.
But surely, ten years later, now that so many of us have become radicalized to how little our bodies matter to research; now that I’ve written a doorstop of a book on the topic and countless articles on the flagrant inequities in medicine; now that other women have done the same; now that the White House has promised to fund more and better research for women, surely the research inequities between men and women would be much less lopsided in 2023 than they were back in the dark ages of 2013, right? Right?
Wrong. In 2023, the NIH appropriated only 7.9% of their research dollars to the study of women’s bodies: a decrease, over the course of a decade, of nearly two percentage points.
Moreover, diseases that solely affect women’s bodies are still not being studied. At all! Here’s a direct quote from the National Academies own press release:
“Many fundamental questions about women’s health remain unaddressed by research. For example, female-specific conditions such as endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome, and uterine fibroids affect millions of women, and yet physicians lack clear guidance and innovative interventions to manage these often-debilitating conditions. Significant knowledge gaps also exist for women’s health across their lifespan — for example, the health effects of menopause, or how complications during pregnancy are associated with the risk of developing chronic conditions later in life. Although women have a lower prevalence of cardiovascular disease than men, they face worse prognoses after heart attacks or strokes, and scientists’ understanding of the reasons behind this difference is limited.”
The video below, also created by the same organization, maps it out in laywoman’s terms.
Luckily, this report also offer tangible solutions and recommendations to the NIH for fixing this problem of research sexism and inequity, which I’ll greatly summarize below:
Form a new institute to address the gaps in women’s health research and create a new interdisciplinary research fund.
Reform the process for tracking and analyzing NIH investments in research funding to improve accuracy for reporting to Congress and the public on expenditures on women’s health research.
Develop and implement a transparent, biennial process to set priorities for women’s health research.
Augment existing programs and develop new ones to attract researchers and support career pathways for scientists through all stages of the careers of women’s health researchers.
Augment existing grant programs and develop new ones specifically designed to promote interdisciplinary science and career development in areas related to women’s health, prioritizing and promoting participation of women and investigators from underrepresented communities.
Strengthen efforts to ensure balanced representation and appropriate expertise when evaluating grant proposals pertaining to women’s health and sex differences research in the peer review process.
Revise how the NIH supports and implements its sex as a biological variable policy to ensure it fulfills the intended goals.
Prioritize research that includes but is not limited to the following: basic science, preclinical research, clinical research, population-based research, across the research spectrum, implementation science research.
Considering our incoming president’s choice of economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya—a critic of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates who lied about being censored for his views—to run the NIH, I don’t hold out much hope that these recommendations will be followed during the next four years, let alone that the NIH will spend more of its research dollars on women’s health and well being. However, it’s incumbent upon us not to give up either hope or our battle for health equity without a fight. Even when hope and our will to keep pushing up against the purposeful chaos of this new regime might be in short supply.
So what tangible thing can you do right now, today? Easy. You can write a letter to your congressperson, as I just did, by cutting and pasting the following missive, which I’ve repurposed directly from the academy’s report, then click here to find your representative and fill out their form. Feel free to forward this template to anyone you know who might want to do the same. I’ll make this story free for all readers:
Dear Mr./Ms. ________:
I have just read this damning report https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/28586/a-new-vision-for-womens-health-research-transformative-change-at by the National Association of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on the state of and funding for research of women’s health in the U.S. To address these inexcusable research gaps, the National Institutes of Health should form a new institute focused on women’s health and make changes to expand oversight, accountability, and support for this research across the entire agency. Congress should appropriate new funding totaling $15.7 billion to support these efforts over five years — including $4 billion in dedicated funding for the new institute, $11.4 billion to establish a new NIH-wide fund to support and foster interdisciplinary women’s health research, and funding to support and expand career pathways for the field.
Thank you very much for your time and attention to this matter.
Sincerely yours,
[Your Name Here]
Keep writing about this. My daughter is pregnant and was diagnosed with gestational diabetes. The drug metformin, which was introduced as a medication in France in 1957, is what they are treating her with. But, she was told, there is no data on the women and the drug crossing the placenta so it could be detrimental to the baby , or maybe not. Absolutely ridiculous that nobody has done that research. In talking with a diabetes researcher, my daughter in laws brother, he stated he never does studies on women because it’s too hard! We are 50% of the population and the only ones having babies. Please keep bringing these topics into the light. Bless you for all the work you’ve done so far.
Done and sent. This issue has plagued the practice of medicine forever, and now we have the money & equipment to change it. Even mouse research is done mostly on male mice because “hormones complicate results.”