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Medical science is in fact terribly biased against women because the standard baseline is almost always a typical male body
(lemmy.world)
Source for the 7% statistic
this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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I don’t doubt that women are underrepresented in medical research, but at the same time I suspect most medical research targets issues that affect both men and women, since that is true of most medical issues. The 7% statistic would be more impactful if we could compare it to the percentage of medical research focused on medical issues specific to men.
Edit: after further consideration, my initial take here isn’t great either, because women face more medical issues specific to their gender. I still think the 7% statistic is a little misleading.
Yep, that 7% doesn't mean the rest is going to research on men specific health, it means that 7% is for women health, an unknown % is for men health and the rest is for human health in general (which is logically the biggest %).
Issues that affect both women and men still often tend to affect both in different ways -- but the majority of medical research tends to just take what works for the standard male body and apply that to everyone regardless of sex instead of investigating sex-specific effects and tailoring solutions around that
that’s a clinical bias, the person above was asking about a research bias.
edit:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/biomedical-research-sex-male-female-animal-human-studies
as of 2019:
clinical bias is not necessarily from the criteria. often the clinician is the one introducing the bias all on their own.
"In 2020, only 1% of funding for healthcare research and innovation (beyond oncology) was invested in women's health."
That's not what that means at all. It means gynecological research + research into other issues that only affect female physiology only accounts of 7% of all medical research. The other 93% is either focused on general or male-specific issues (and conducted mostly on men).
Is it just medical research? It just says research in general. I'm not making a claim either way, but agree it's worded very poorly.
The headline is of course misleading, but not really for the reasons you pointed out. Nobody is going to read that headline and think it means 93% of gynecological research is conducted on men. Some people might read it and think it means 93% of medical research overall is conducted on men, though.