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As reproductive health remains a key issue in the 2024 US presidential election, a recent executive order signed by President Joe Biden to improve women’s health research grabbed headlines. The March 18 directive is notable for its aim to integrate women’s health across federal agencies and drive new research. The timing could not be better.
For centuries, medical researchers have exclusively studied men, downplaying or outright ignoring sex differences and extrapolating their findings to women. However, women are not physiologically the same as men — marked most plainly with the onset of menstruation at female puberty and two X chromosomes — and thus have often been given incomplete, poor and even harmful medical advice.
This long-standing lack of female-based research stemming from sex and gender bias spurred Dr. Stacy Sims, an exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist based in Mount Maunganui, New Zealand, to devote her career to determining how women should be eating and exercising for optimal health. “If we work with our physiology knowing that women are women and men are men, knowing that women are not small men, then imagine the (health) outcomes,” she said at a 2019 TED talk.
READ MORE: Lab rats are overwhelmingly male, and that’s a problem
Cardiac arrest is a good example. While it was known in 2007 that women are nearly twice as likely to die from heart attacks as men, and that they report many more symptoms associated with acute coronary syndromes, a National Institutes of Health study published that year still recommended against differentiating heart attack symptoms between men and women.