{"id":13867,"date":"2026-08-25T14:09:06","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T08:39:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/?p=13867"},"modified":"2026-08-25T14:09:06","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T08:39:06","slug":"why-women-were-excluded-from-medical-research-the-history-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/why-women-were-excluded-from-medical-research-the-history-explained\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Women Were Excluded From Medical Research: The History Explained"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What you will learn in this blog about <\/span><b>why women were excluded from medical research:<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The male body was treated as the default in medical research, while women were often studied mainly in relation to reproductive health.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Pregnancy and hormonal changes were seen as complications that made women harder to study, reinforcing their underrepresentation in research.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The thalidomide tragedy led to the FDA discouraging the inclusion of women of childbearing age in early-phase drug trials in 1977.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The exclusion of women left important gaps in understanding how diseases and treatments can affect women differently.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This <\/span><b>women\u2019s health research gap<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> had real-world consequences, including higher rates of adverse drug reactions and delays or errors in disease diagnosis.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Women are better represented in research today, but significant gaps in female participation and sex specific medical data still remain.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Why women were excluded from medical research <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">starts with a word you\u2019ve probably heard before. Hysteria.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Today, we use it to describe someone who\u2019s wildly emotional or panicking. But the word originally came from the Greek <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">hystera<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, meaning uterus.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yep. Uterus.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For centuries, doctors genuinely believed that a woman\u2019s uterus could \u201cwander\u201d around her body, causing all kinds of physical and psychological symptoms.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Pain? Hysteria.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Anxiety? Hysteria.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Fainting? Hysteria.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A symptom they couldn\u2019t explain? You get the idea.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">While the wandering womb theory eventually disappeared, the idea behind it lingered\u2026 that women\u2019s bodies were somehow too complicated or unpredictable to study easily.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When modern medical research started taking shape, that thinking had consequences. Women were often left out of clinical studies and trials, with concerns ranging from <\/span><b>fluctuating hormones in clinical trials<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> to the possibility of pregnancy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And so, for decades, we built medical knowledge largely around the male body and assumed it would work for everyone else too. This created a <\/span><b>gender bias in medical research<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> that contributed to a <\/span><b>women\u2019s health research gap<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> we\u2019re still trying to understand today.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So, let\u2019s dig deeper into the <\/span><b>history of women in medical research<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>Why Women Were Left Out of Medical Research<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Clinical trials for medical research started in the mid-20th century, as more and more new medicines were being developed and researchers needed a proper way to test them before they reached patients.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And the <\/span><b>inclusion of women in medical studies<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> was pretty common back then. However, there was a pretty obvious divide.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><b>Women were mainly studied for reproductive health<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Women were mostly studied for things related to their bodies, like reproductive health, while men were used to examine pretty much everything else, including ALL the diseases and medicines that could affect BOTH men and women.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This was reinforced by the way medicine itself was taught. Medical books and even skeletons used in science labs had long treated the male body as the standard, while women\u2019s bodies were often seen as something that mainly needed to be studied when it came to reproduction.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><em>Blog continues after the ad.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/sanitary-pads\/?utm_source=Blog&amp;utm_medium=PageAd&amp;utm_campaign=BlogAds_SP_021225\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-12418 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Blinkit_Masthead_SPSSP-300x210.png\" alt=\"Promotional banner on a coral background displaying Nua period pad boxes placed on elevated blocks. Text reads \u2018Zero Irritation, 4x Comfort. Explore Nua\u2019s Period Care Range.\u2019 with a \u2018Shop now\u2019 button.\" width=\"471\" height=\"330\" srcset=\"https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Blinkit_Masthead_SPSSP-300x210.png 300w, https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Blinkit_Masthead_SPSSP-1024x717.png 1024w, https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Blinkit_Masthead_SPSSP-768x538.png 768w, https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Blinkit_Masthead_SPSSP-360x252.png 360w, https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Blinkit_Masthead_SPSSP.png 1120w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 471px) 100vw, 471px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<h3><b>Social expectations made women harder to include in trials<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Social expectations around modesty meant that women being examined or treated by male doctors could be considered improper or undignified. This created another barrier to women\u2019s participation in medicine and medical research.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A natural solution would have been to have more female doctors for researching women. But women had far fewer opportunities to study and work in medicine, so that simply wasn\u2019t possible.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><b>Women were seen as difficult to study because of periods<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Researchers saw men as more \u201cstraightforward\u201d research subjects. Women\u2019s menstrual cycles naturally cause hormone levels to change throughout the month. Researchers worried that these changes could affect how women responded to medicine or treatment, making the results harder to compare and understand.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This meant researchers had to consider where women were in their menstrual cycle, making studies more complicated to plan. Instead, it often seemed easier to study men and treat their results as the standard.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In short, the ease of studying men, combined with a system that had long been built around men, made the male body the default in medical research.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>How The Thalidomide Tragedy Reinforced This Exclusion<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Despite the clear bias towards men, you could still see some representation of <\/span><b>women in medical research<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> until the thalidomide tragedy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the late 1950s and early 1960s, thalidomide (a sedative) was widely prescribed to pregnant women for morning sickness. However, its effects during pregnancy had not been properly studied, and it was not tested on pregnant animals for potential effects on the foetus before being marketed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The result was devastating. As per <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/articles\/PMC4112512\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">reports<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, thalidomide was linked to more than 10,000 children being born with severe birth defects across 46 countries, particularly limb deformities, including children born without fully developed arms or legs.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And what happened next is where things get complicated.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In an attempt to protect women from another tragedy like thalidomide, the FDA issued guidelines in 1977 discouraging the inclusion of women of childbearing age in early-phase drug trials.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And it wasn\u2019t just drugs being developed for pregnant women. The guidelines affected research across the board, meaning women were being left out of studies for general medicines that they would eventually be prescribed, too.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The intention was protection. But the impact was exclusion.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>But What About Women Who Weren\u2019t Pregnant?<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If the entire rationale for limiting participation of <\/span><b>women in medical research <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">was protecting fertility and pregnancy, you&#8217;d expect the exclusion to ease up for women who weren&#8217;t at risk of either.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, it didn&#8217;t.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Women who had already gone through menopause, women who&#8217;d had hysterectomies, women reliably using contraception, all of them were still frequently left out or underrepresented in trials that had nothing to do with reproductive risk.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">All this suggests the real driver behind the<\/span><b> women&#8217;s health research gap <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">was researchers not wanting to deal with a population seen as more &#8220;complicated.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>What This Actually Meant for Women\u2019s Health<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Lack of <\/span><b>female representation in medical research<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> wasn\u2019t just a problem sitting inside medical papers. It followed women straight into the real world.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li aria-level=\"1\">\n<h3><b>Overmedication and more side effects<\/b><\/h3>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A 2020 <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/articles\/PMC7275616\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">analysis<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> looked at 86 FDA-approved medicines, including commonly used drugs for things like heart conditions, depression, pain, and seizures.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What they found was pretty alarming. Women were often given the same dose as men, even though the drugs stayed in their bodies for longer and reached higher levels in their blood. And because of that, in more than 90% of these cases, women experienced worse side effects than men. So much so that women were found to have nearly 2x the rate of adverse drug reactions.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li aria-level=\"1\">\n<h3><b>Lack of understanding of pain\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Estrogen and progesterone, hormones that change throughout the menstrual cycle, influence how the body processes pain (more on that <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/menstrual-cramps-and-prostaglandins-the-chemical-cause-of-period-pain\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">here<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">). This can affect pain sensitivity and how a woman responds to a painkiller, including the dose she may need at different points in her cycle.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is a VERY important place where the<\/span><b> impact of the menstrual cycle on medical research<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> comes in. But researchers spent decades treating it as a complication rather than a variable worth studying in women.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li aria-level=\"1\">\n<h3><b>Gaps in treatment and diagnosis of diseases<\/b><\/h3>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Gender bias in medical research <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">can affect how diseases are understood, diagnosed, and treated in women.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Take heart attacks, for example.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Our idea of what a heart attack \u201clooks like\u201d is largely based on research involving men.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The classic movie version is a man clutching his chest with crushing chest pain. Women can have that too, but they may also experience nausea, unusual fatigue, shortness of breath, or pain in the jaw, back, or stomach. These symptoms, however, have been less recognised as signs of a heart attack, making them easier to miss or dismiss.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In fact, one <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/articles\/PMC10945154\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">study<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> found that women were around 50% more likely than men to receive the wrong initial diagnosis after a heart attack.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For a closer look at how heart attacks can show up differently in women, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/world-heart-day-your-heart-health-matters\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">read Hetal\u2019s story and her journey to better heart health<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li aria-level=\"1\">\n<h3><b>Women-specific diseases remain poorly understood<\/b><\/h3>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The lack of research on women also meant that conditions like endometriosis, PCOS, and PMDD were often poorly understood, leaving major gaps in our understanding of their causes, symptoms, and treatment. To this day, symptoms of these conditions are more likely to be dismissed or mistaken for something else. Diagnosis is often delayed, leaving women without the right treatment for longer and allowing symptoms to worsen. Learn more about it <a href=\"https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/why-the-period-gap-in-medical-research-is-so-big-explained\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">These are just a handful of examples. The problem was never that women\u2019s bodies were too complicated to study. We simply spent too long studying one body and assuming it could speak for everyone.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>What&#8217;s Changed Since, and What Hasn&#8217;t<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In 1993, the NIH finally reversed the earlier exclusion and required women to be included in federally funded research. That was 16 years after the 1977 guidelines had pushed women out.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But changing the rule didn\u2019t magically fix the gap. There was no strong enforcement mechanism, and women continued to be underrepresented in research for years after.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Things have improved since then. Women are studied far more today, and there\u2019s growing momentum and funding around <\/span><b>women\u2019s health research<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But we\u2019re still not quite there.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">An<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/abs\/pii\/S1551714422000441\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">analysis<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of more than 1,400 clinical trials involving over 300,000 participants found that women made up just 41.2% of participants on average. That\u2019s still lower than the proportion of women affected by many of the conditions being studied.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So yes, things have changed. But equal representation in medical research still isn\u2019t the norm, and we\u2019re still missing sex-specific data for many medicines.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>A Second Opinion Might Be Due<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><b>Gender bias in medical research<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> isn\u2019t ancient history, and it&#8217;s not a conspiracy theory either. It&#8217;s the truth that quietly shaped an entire century of medicine.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Think about it. Most of the medications sitting in a woman\u2019s cabinet right now were approved before 1993, tested on a research population that, by design, looked nothing like half the people eventually taking them.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Things have changed since then. Women are far more represented in research today, and women\u2019s health is finally getting more attention. But the gaps haven\u2019t disappeared. We\u2019re still working with decades of research that didn\u2019t always ask how medicines, diseases, and treatments might work differently in women.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So the next time you hear that something is \u201cnormal\u201d for women, it\u2019s worth asking a slightly annoying question. Normal according to whom?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Have you noticed a medication or diagnosis that seemed to affect you differently than expected? Drop it in the comments and let\u2019s raise awareness together.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><b>Disclaimer<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The content of this article is provided for general informational and educational purposes only and is not intended to constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The information shared is of a general nature and may not be appropriate for all individuals or specific circumstances. Readers should not disregard, delay, or substitute professional medical advice based on the information contained herein.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If you experience any symptoms, notice anything unusual, or have concerns relating to your health or overall well-being, you should consult a qualified healthcare professional. While every effort is made to ensure the information shared is accurate and up-to-date, Nua makes no representations or warranties, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, completeness, or suitability of the information provided and disclaims all liability arising from reliance on this content to the fullest extent permitted by law.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What you will learn in this blog about why women were excluded from medical research: The male body was treated&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":130,"featured_media":13868,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_editorskit_title_hidden":false,"_editorskit_reading_time":0,"_editorskit_typography_data":[],"_editorskit_blocks_typography":"","_editorskit_is_block_options_detached":false,"_editorskit_block_options_position":"{}","footnotes":""},"categories":[221,232],"tags":[77],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13867"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/130"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13867"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13869,"href":"https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13867\/revisions\/13869"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuawoman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}