Episode 6: Exclusion of Women from Health Research: Then and Now



“…premenopausal women were actively banned from participating in clinical drug trials in the United States, and it wasn’t until years later around the late 1990s that females were introduced back into clinical health trials in both the States and in Canada. So within those years, we lost decades of research in females, which leads to a lack of understanding women’s health and sex differences in general.” -Amanda Namchuk and Tallinn Splinter

In this episode, Amanda Namchuk and Tallinn Splinter will join us to discuss the exclusion of women from health research and how that has impacted us in the past, present and foreseeable future. They discuss how a lack of research on women and their bodies has led to a gap in research on sex and gender. Amanda and Tallinn will also go over how to better address this gap both on an individual and systemic level.

Links to resources mentioned in this episode:

• Are we Moving the Dial? Sex-and Gender-based Analysis
• Exclusion of Women From Clinical Research: Myth or Reality?
• History of Women’s Participation in Clinical Research
• Not Enough Studies are Looking at Sex Differences
• Harnessing the Power of Sex Differences
• Women’s Involvement in Clinical Trials
• Why Women Have be Excluded from Medical Studies About Their Own Bodies

Guest Biography

Amanda Namchuk is a third year PhD student in the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Toronto. She is studying chronic stress and the cognitive symptoms of depression. Tallinn Splinter recently completed her B.Sc. in Biology at the University of British Columbia and is interested in studying the sex differences in brain health, genetics, and women’s health. Both Amanda and Tallinn were part of the Sex-and-Gender-Based Analysis research team for the Women’s Health Research Cluster, where they co-authored a paper evaluating the integration of sex- and gender-based analysis in projects.