The Role of Women in the Healthcare Ecosystem: Why Women's Data Matters

Healthcare has been a male-dominated field for centuries. From the early days of Hippocrates to the modern era, women have always played a subordinate role in healthcare. Even today, women comprise only around a quarter of the healthcare workforce worldwide. An unbalanced force is not just a problem of equity; it also has implications for data collection and analysis. Healthcare systems are designed primarily with men in mind, leading to problems for women when they try to access care. We could also argue that those problems carry over to finding the proper care, being appropriately diagnosed, and finding the appropriate treatment. Women have to be very self-reliant to navigate the current self-care system, and we all can't be healthcare specialists.

One way that inequity manifests is in clinical trials. Organizations have often excluded women from clinical trials, historically considered too "complicated" to study. This conclusion is attributable to unsubstantiated claims that women experience more significant hormonal fluctuations than men, which can skew results. Women are also more likely to be on multiple medications, complicating results. As a result of this exclusion, women are often undertreated and undertested for many conditions. Women of childbearing age were also excluded from trials because, as the FDA put it…