Fighting the Gender Stereotypes That Warp Biomedical Research

JoAnna Klein (NY Times, May 2019) reported that just added females to research studies without examining the underlying historic biases that caused females to be neglected in research will not improve the science.  Instead we need to ‘stop looking through a male lens’.  She continues ‘In the Victorian era, the idea that women were inferior to men was replaced by the notion that women were hysterical, disorganized, emotional — the hormone-driven counterpoints to rational, stable men.’  This bias sets up males as the norm, quoting Daniela Pollak “We live in a world where the assumption is that males are the standard, the reference population, and females are the ones that are odd”.  That bias can affect the interpretation of data, the analysis done by peer reviewers, and the evaluations of grant proposals.  Klein’s article explores some specific flawed outcomes from this historical perspective.

For the complete article see: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/health/gender-stereotypes-research.html

For the Shansky Science article that sparked Klein’s report see: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6443/825