It’s no secret that women have been historically excluded from fields that were predominantly male led, and the lack of women’s health research in the medical and scientific spheres are no exception.
Chemistry teacher Leah Roskin says that it seems that we keep learning about how certain conditions are affecting women much later than how men are affected.
“I always think about heart attack symptoms and what we are all warned about is not the typical symptoms in women,” Roksin said. “It seems that inferences into women’s health are ever changing and that women have started talking more about symptoms which has changed how the medical field looks at women.”
This gap in medical research is not only limited to health issues that arise in both men and women, but Roskin says it can also be seen in the way medicine and science approaches diagnosing and treating endometriosis. “Lots of women have period pain and finally they are being listened to and diagnosed which is ultimately leading to them getting treated,” Roskin said.
Researcher Kathryn Zamiela, who is a volunteer for Dr. Ece Mutlu’s microbiome lab at UIC, is someone who has been struggling with endometriosis for years and has even joined in the efforts to discover more about the disease. With very little sexual health education and a more conservative family, Zamiela described growing up not entirely prepared for her future and how her own body functions.
“Even doctors were kind of dismissive, and it just went on like that until I had a cyst rupture, and then they were like, ‘That’s not good,’” Zamiela said. “So just having no understanding about what’s going on in my own body was very frustrating.”
Senior Ella Lateano, who is hoping to pursue a biomedical major on a pre-med track, also recognizes the lack of research on women and women’s health in STEM and medicine—saying that women have remained significantly underrepresented and understudied in medical research.
Being a Women in Lit student, Lateano also studied this topic for her class project, “Left Out: The Hidden Cost of Representation Gaps in Medical Research,” and she says that many think of these representational divides as supposedly things of the past, when they are very much still an ongoing concern for women.
She points to pharmacology, which greatly demonstrates the gap in women’s health research.
“Because most drugs are tested on men, women have actually reported higher rates and differing adverse side effects because a lot of the time, dosages are adjusted for a man’s body composition and metabolism,” Lateano said. “Some other examples include how women often go misdiagnosed when they are having heart attacks because symptoms can differ between men and women and also how even though autoimmune disorders disproportionately affect women, we still know very little about them.”
But these divides in medical and scientific research surrounding women’s health have been long standing gaps for decades. Lateano says that these voids in research are mainly due to the fact that there have always been deeply rooted biases against women when it came to social and scientific inclusion.
She says that for years, men’s bodies were always considered the “standard” whereas women’s bodies were declared “atypical” simply because of their hormones throughout their menstrual cycles, which, as a result, has led to the greater exclusion of women in clinical trials and biological research.
“This male-norm bias meant that drug-testing and clinical trials used mainly male subjects and then the results were generalized to women,” Lateano said. “This imbalance was furthered because of reproductive concerns, specifically following a period of birth-defects that were caused by a drug called thalidomide, where ‘women of childbearing potential’ were subsequently excluded from all trials.”
Roskin also said that these gaps exist due to our culture and society that does not necessarily prioritize women’s health. “I would say in the last 20 years women have begun to talk more openly about medical conditions, which I think forces the medical field to look more into those conditions,” Roskin said.
Zamiela also said funding for women’s health is a subagency of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—barely even registering as its own specific fund for women, and if anything, that subagency, the Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH), is mainly focused on childbirth and childcare, leaving a small sliver of research funding for non-childbirth related issues.
And since women fall under the DEI umbrella, the funding for women’s health research has been decreased, forcing some researchers and labs to consider ceasing their work due to a lack of funding.
These traditional gaps in the past have still continued to bleed into the current curriculum that students are taught in secondary schools, especially female students. “If students are learning examples from textbooks that are based on male centered biology, women are not going to have adequate health literacy about their bodies which can lead to more problems down the road,” Lateano said.
As for ways to get more involved in helping bridge the research gap for women’s health, Roskin suggests talking to different nonprofits and organizations that are available to give information to students with questions. Zamiela also references the Endometriosis Foundation of America which is a very approachable organization.
Lateano says that the first step is to be educated on the matter, as the root of this issue is due to ignorance.
“You can also create or participate in science clubs that discuss these issues and advocate for equality in scientific research, as well as write letters to universities and scientific institutions advocating for more funding towards women centered studies,” Lateano said, as she also recalls how many who visited her Women in Lit Fest project didn’t know about the disproportionate representation of women in research.
“This is not just a ‘women’s issue.’ Women make up approximately half of the global population- chances are, you know somebody that has been or will be, impacted by the lack of research into women’s bodies.”
