But boosting investment could reap big rewards.
Kerri Smith
Nature article on women's health research

Women have been historically under-represented in other parts of the medical research pipeline, such as clinical trials. The same is true for female animals in basic research. “It takes a long time to recover from the gaps in the evidence base that resulted from exclusion,” says Temkin.

Work to rectify the bias in clinical research is paying off in some places: by 2014, about half of all participants in clinical trials funded by the NIH were women. But even so, women are not necessarily included in proportions that match the prevalence or burden of disease.

Efforts are under way to offset the gender gap in funding. In May last year, two US Democratic members of Congress from Illinois, Senator Tammy Duckworth and Representative Jan Schakowsky, introduced a bill calling for a doubling of investment in women’s health research.