The Fact
The National Academies’ 2025 consensus report said women’s-health research remains severely lacking and that medical advances for women have lagged partly because basic sex-based physiological differences are still inadequately understood. It reported that women’s-health research funding had stagnated and shrunk as a share of NIH funding, and that most studies enrolling both men and women still do not analyze sex or gender differences.
What This Means
Medicine did not simply fix the women’s-research problem after recognizing it in 1985. Forty years later, the nation’s scientific academy was still calling for basic research into female physiology and for routine analysis of how diseases and treatments differ by sex.
When basic physiology is incomplete, the gap travels downstream into diagnosis, dosing, treatment, prevention, and the questions researchers think to ask.
Sources
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. A New Vision for Women’s Health Research: Transformative Change at the National Institutes of Health. 2025. DOI: 10.17226/28586. https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/28586