In 1993, Congress passed a law requiring women to be included in medical trials. Up until that moment most, if not all, studies did not include women. In 2025, black people are still not required to participate in clinical trials, and according to a study by the National Cancer Institute, only end up in about 5-7% of medical trials.
“It’s not only the current discrimination of doctors and nurses, it’s decades of discrimination that has built up over time,” author and law professor Dr. Keisha Ray said. “The entire system of healthcare is built to put a group of people at a disadvantage.”
Access to healthcare is necessary to maintain an optimal lifestyle. But because of institutional barriers and lack of representation built up across decades, marginalized populations, such as women and minorities, generally have less access to it.
“When I was younger, I was prescribed a pill for my chronic headaches,” mother Erin Smith said. “Little did I or the doctors at the time know, this medicine made my periods so unbelievably painful that I had to immediately get off it. They might have known this, had the law requiring female participation been in place at the time.”
The National Institute of Health found that there are significant, recordable differences in how medicine affects women versus men. Not only are women built differently in both body fat percentage and weight, the difference in amount of hormones creates a massive difference in how their body reacts to certain drugs. According to a study by the University of California, women are more likely to fall into certain medical crises, and are almost 50% more likely to have an adverse reaction to drugs.
“Most medical schools have yet to acknowledge the biases existing in their years of accumulated research, so that information gets passed on to the younger generation,” biochemist Dr. Natasha Karp said. “These new students are also unaware of the flaws in medical research, which leads to more female fatalities.”
This discrepancy in medical treatment between men and women is especially apparent in the diagnosis of heart attacks. Most people are informed that the symptoms of a heart attack are chest pain and nausea. However, these are only the most common symptoms for men. Women, however, often experience significantly different symptoms. They can feel back pain, jaw or neck pain, as well as feelings of indigestion. The only reason the former symptoms are more widespread is because male heart attack studies came first.
“Not only is getting the doctor to listen to you difficult, but also getting the right medication,” Smith said. “There are not enough studies conducted with women taken into account, therefore many medicines may have adverse effects that no one ever really bothered to learn about because, no one ever really considered it.”
While a majority of medicine and medical information extends to the vast majority of people across all demographics, highly specific medical fields and medications have to be equally suited to their patients. NIH found that there are pronounced differences in different races and ethnicities shown through metabolism, clinical effectiveness, and side effects of clinically important drugs. These differences are what make equity in clinical studies so important to women’s health.
“I think we are going to have to make a real, conscious effort to not only include minorities in studies from now on, but to recreate older studies to make them less inaccurate,” says Dr. Ray. “We need to reach a point where it is inconceivable for one group of people to die from one thing disproportionately more than another not only due to behavior and situation, but especially due to failure and bias on behalf of the medical practitioner.”
