Sex bias in medicine isn’t just a historical oversight. It continues to shape which treatments get developed, who benefits from them, and who is put at risk. When research fails to analyze men and women separately, major therapeutic insights disappear. When clinical research does not analyze data separately for men and women, major therapeutic opportunities can be lost.
Some drugs, devices, or interventions may work extremely well for one sex but not the other, yet this distinction becomes invisible when results are pooled together. In other cases, treatments that appear only modestly effective overall may actually provide strong benefits to one sex, as seen with the HPV vaccine, which demonstrates much higher efficacy in women than in men. The Cost of Exclusion: How Decades of Research Overlooked Women When Aggregated Data Hides Life-Saving Differences Gender bias continues to persist…
