Liu
Angela Liu
Professor Knighten
Writing 39C
11 May 2014
Awareness of Gender Bias Leads to Many Solutions
Sex and gender bias existed in our society for the longest time, and it still exists today.
Gender bias is a prevailing problem especially when it is associated in the medical and science
field because it affects the health of many people. However, gender bias isn’t brought to
attention because there are many reasons as to why men are the main participants in research,
“the obvious physical and physiological differences between men and women …influences
metabolic activity”(Kim). When there is sex and gender bias during clinical trials, many things
can go wrong: effectiveness, safety, and production of experimental drugs. For example,
Ambien is one of the current drugs that the FDA had to change the dosage depending on gender
because of incidents of females developing side effects faster than men. The definition of sex and
gender bias would typically be against females, however, in clinical trials, gender bias against
males also exist, for example, clinical trials associated with breast cancer since it is more
common in woman. However, recently, the main victims to this problem are females. To limit
the existing sex and gender bias in clinical trials, a plausible proposition would be to regulate
researchers to state the gender of the participants and influence the funding agencies and
organizations to be aware of this prevailing problem. This solution is the most effective because
it not only brings awareness of the problem with statistics but it also forces the researchers to
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include the statistics to obtain funds for the clinical trial. Acquiring data about the whole trial
brings awareness to the public and the unequal genders of participants.
In the past, the National Institutes of Health noticed the lack of women representatives in
the participant pool for clinical trials. To fix the problem, the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993
was mandated to urge the inclusion of women in phase 3 clinical trials to be funded by the
National Institutes of Health. What about phase 1 and phase 2? Because it was just an “urge”,
for two decades, this act wasn’t enforced and the women are currently still underrepresented in
clinical trials. Also, because clinical trials can be funded by other organizations, there are plenty
of trials that weren’t sex-specific. Due to the lack of enforcement and awareness, this act wasn’t
successful to prevent victims of drugs that weren’t tested completely.
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