Is there still a gender gap in medical research?

Short Wave

NPR

Nature, News, Astronomy, Science, Daily News, Life Sciences

4.7 • 6.5K Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2026

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

When you go to the doctor’s office, your doctor has to figure out which treatment is best for you. Physicians rely on medical research and clinical trials to make sure those treatments are safe and effective. But that research has not always been inclusive, which impacts patient care. Women and people of color were only required to be included in medical trials funded by the NIH starting in 1993. Now, studies are more inclusive – but how we study sex and gender in research is still controversial. In this episode, we unpack how medicine sorts the sexes – and why it’s not as simple as it seems.

If you liked this episode, check out our previous one unpacking biological sex.

Interested in more science behind medicine? Email us your questions at shortwave@npr.org.

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This episode was produced by Hannah Chinn. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kwesi Lee was the audio engineer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:05.9	Hey, shortwivers, Emily Kwong here with Shortwave's intern, Arru Nair.
0:09.8	Hi, Emily.
0:10.6	Hi.
0:11.4	And Angela Zhang, who has joined our team through the Stanford Health Equity Media Fellowship and is an actual doctor.
0:18.0	Hey, Emily.
0:18.7	It's so good to be here.
0:20.1	Good to have you.
0:20.9	Now, Aru, I hear you have a medical fact you wanted to share with us.
0:24.4	So, Emily, did you know that it wasn't mandatory to include women in medical trials funded by the National Institutes of Health until 1993?
0:33.6	Wait, medical trials, like drug trials?
0:36.1	Yeah, partially. And these trials are really important.
0:39.3	The NIH is the largest single public funder of biomedical research in the world.
0:44.4	Like, I'm a doctor, right?
0:45.7	So I'm constantly looking at results of research on different drugs or treatments.
0:49.5	And this helps me decide if a test her medicine I'm using is safe or effective for my patients.
0:55.1	And you're saying it wasn't mandatory for women to be included in those until the 1990s?
0:59.8	Yeah, we probably need some backstory here.
1:02.2	So there was this global scandal starting in the late 1950s where tens of thousands of pregnant women, mainly in Europe,
1:08.9	took this sedative called thalidomide for a morning
1:11.4	sickness. People who took the drug while pregnant ended up having babies whose limbs were poorly
1:16.4	developed or even absent. This happened to over 12,000 kids. And it led to the Food and Drug
	...

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