childfree

I don’t doubt that women are underrepresented in medical research, but at the same time I suspect most medical research targets issues that affect both men and women, since that is true of most medical issues. The 7% statistic would be more impactful if we could compare it to the percentage of medical research focused on medical issues specific to men.

Edit: after further consideration, my initial take here isn’t great either, because women face more medical issues specific to their gender. I still think the 7% statistic is a little misleading.

I won't pretend to see the whole picture here but it sounds like we're talking about 7% female specific data vs everything else. Most of the remaining data may be non gender specific.

To present this as 7% female and 93% male is disingenuous.

As a counterpoint, breast cancer research (an issue predominantly affecting women) recieves far more funding than prostate cancer research.

the standard baseline is almost always a typical male body

luckily this is not really true anymore.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/biomedical-research-sex-male-female-animal-human-studies

If you read the linked source, it says 7% is research that is aimed at issues that EXCLUSIVELY affect women.

incredibly misleading. piss off with your bullshit

Not true. Most studies nowadays include male & female participants - and more research focuses on exclusively female than exclusively male issues

The real bias is against normal human beings. Nursing/medical students and medical professionals are vastly overrepresented amongst study participants - and young people. These groups of people are much healthier than the average human being. Steps have been taken to address this too, but it is slow going.

That sounds fine. How much funding should go to exclusively womens issues?

How much funding is on male only health issues? We need something to compare because that stat alone is useless.

Couldn't open the source link, unfortunately. So what's the percentage of women specific health issues? And what % of funding goes to health issues that only impact men?

more than likely medical professionals are more likely to ignore women, when they present symptoms of a disease, they are often balked, or dismissed as attention seeking behaviour. heart disease tends to be ignored in women in some cases.

medical science is less clear on biasing against woman or men. they might focus on certain gender groups for different diseases, like MS is more likely to occur in women, but in men its more severe. some cancers are more likely in men than woman. like P.Dermatitis is more common in women than in men, but some diseases are equally affecting both genders.

also for cancers, they might ignore both genders if you're "too young" for it.

I tried finding the percentage of funding for issues affecting exclusively men, expecting a simple table in the source for the article or something. But nope. I haven't found a single good up-to-date source that even tracks that spending at all.

The only good source I found this article but it's a bit too old (25 years old) for my liking: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GAOREPORTS-HEHS-00-96/html/GAOREPORTS-HEHS-00-96.htm Formatting tables are annoying so I will just include the 1999 figures. For more information see table 3 in the link.

Table 3: Percentages of NIH Expenditures for Research on Women, Men, and Both, Fiscal Years ~~1993-~~99

1999
Women: 15.5
Men: 6.4
Both: 78.1

I found a bunch of reports and articles that bring up various figures for women though and not a single one I saw included the figure for research on men exclusive issue. I'm in no way qualified to comment on how medical funding should be distributed. But in my opinion not including the full picture in reports like those is at best extremely misleading.

I think medical research is also biased against healthier people. The "standard baseline... male body" isn't particularly healthy, especially in older ages. People just don't take very good care of themselves, they eat crappy food, and don't exercise. I'm thinking specifically of high LDL cholesterol, and statins being universally shoved at us to bring it down. But, recent research shows that high LDL cholesterol alone, in an otherwise quite healthy person, may not be the risk to plaque build up it's assumed to be. Because, most of the research is done on less healthy, "standard baseline... males."

That's wild considering most men never go to the doctors willingly

This coming from x? Yeah I’m not trusting shit that comes from that fuckhole of a website. Not a stat nor one of its retarded users

Edit: my bad broskis, I’m just feeling a lil aggressive this morning and I am not sure why

I think a lot of people are missing the point here. The thought “but how much research is dedicated to just men?” isn’t a salient retort.

Women are 50% of the population, and 100% of the humans alive today grew inside body systems that are exclusive to that population. Why would only 7% of research being about women be ok with that reality?

One great source for the gender gap in science is the book Invisible Women. It shows the dire need for data that studies women specifically, as well as having gender-aggregated data in research that studies both sexes. The current body of science, which is based on hundreds of years of research, mostly studied only men or studied both sexes and didn’t separate the results by sex, so women are mostly invisible in research.

Is this even a childfree topic? I'm blocking this community.