“Women and nonhuman female mammals have been given short shrift in biomedical research. Until recently, the research community labored under the misguided assumption that information garnered from studies of males could be generalized without modification to females.” – Zucker, Prendergast, and Beery (2022)
The culture of science has always fueled research biased towards the male body. Scientists are competitive, funding is tight, and tenure-track positions are hard to come by – studying a cycling animal (a female animal with cycling reproductive hormones rather than static controlled hormone levels) adds a few extra steps and the potential for variability which has always been assumed to slow the pace of discovery and publication. This leaves a majority of basic science skewed by the decades of research based on hormone-static, young male animal models.
In 2016, this skew started towards a promising shift. That year, a mandate from the National Institutes of Health required that all funding applicants propose research to either factor in sex as a biological variable or justify single-sex study design (referenced as the “SABV policy”).
Research had just started to reorient and adjust and fill in the gaps and ask the right questions. Researchers had just started to accept that females are not just males with pesky ovaries, and women are not “small men”. As of that conversation (only a month ago), there was some hope that we would eventually start inching our way towards truly understanding sex differences and female physiology at a basic science level. The light at the end of the tunnel seemed far, but we could see it.
In the last few weeks, that light just dimmed.
With new mandates affecting the NIH grant review process, reviewers now have to look out for flagged words. Included on that list – “female” and “women”. The impact of these mandates on progress of the SABV policy remains to be seen, but it is not a stretch to expect an enormous backslide.
As of writing this, the NIH websites that contained information about the SABV policy now show the phrase “Historic document published prior to January 20, 2025”.
I started this project as a way of having more productive conversations about stress and women’s health by applying the lens of motherhood, gender, culture, and society with the expectation that knowledge gaps would continue closing.
But filling knowledge gaps requires data; data requires research; research requires funding. With funding for women’s health (and everything around it) on the line, we might waiting quite a bit longer for that to happen…
LINKS:
Zucker, Prendergast, and Beery. Pervasive Neglect of Sex Differences in Biomedical Research. Cold Spring Harb Perspect Biol. 2022; 14.
Exclusive: NIH appears to archive policy requiring female animals in studies in The Transmitter
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