{"id":23233,"date":"2026-06-12T01:04:39","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T01:04:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/06\/12\/americas-medical-research-system-has-been-failing-women-for-generations-ms-magazine\/"},"modified":"2026-06-12T01:04:39","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T01:04:39","slug":"americas-medical-research-system-has-been-failing-women-for-generations-ms-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/06\/12\/americas-medical-research-system-has-been-failing-women-for-generations-ms-magazine\/","title":{"rendered":"America\u2019s Medical Research System Has Been Failing Women for Generations – Ms. Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ms.\"Ms.<\/a>
More Than A Magazine, A Movement<\/p>\n

Originally published by <\/em>The Contrarian<\/a>.
Last week\u2019s announcement<\/a> of a $215 million contribution by Melinda French Gates in support of women\u2019s health couldn\u2019t have come at a more urgent moment\u2014especially considering Wednesday, June 10, was Equal Research Day<\/a>, marking the anniversary of the day in 1993 when women were finally required to be included in clinical research.
The Trump administration has slashed the number of grants<\/a> funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) focused on women\u2019s health, hardly a surprise given that words such as women<\/em> and gender<\/em> are now banned<\/a> from funding proposals.
This is not just about attacks on DEI, though, nor is it solely a Trump-fueled crisis. No matter which party has been in charge, our nation\u2019s scientific and medical institutions have long failed women. The U.S. has enabled an inexcusable knowledge gap and dearth of innovation, which causes measurable harm\u2014starting with the reality that American women die from avoidable causes more than in any developed country<\/a>.
Maternal mortality rates in the United States are among the highest worldwide<\/a> and exponentially worse<\/a> for Black women. The majority of states have imposed some form of abortion ban<\/a> and more than one in four<\/a> prohibit the procedure altogether. Skyrocketing burnout rates<\/a> among practicing OB-GYNs is contributing to a rise in healthcare deserts, especially in rural communities; over 2.3 million<\/a> women of reproductive age in this country now live in an area with zero access to care.
But the gap goes far deeper than reproductive health. Our nation lags in overall commitment to preventing, treating and curing diseases that affect women uniquely, disproportionately or differently than men, whether those be chronic conditions, genetic disorders or infectious diseases.<\/p>\n

… American women die from avoidable causes more than in any developed country.<\/p>\n

Take cardiovascular disease, the number one killer<\/a> of women in the United States. A bit more than a third<\/a> of patients enrolled in clinical trials are female. Just 4.5 percent<\/a> of the National Institutes of Health\u2019s coronary artery disease research budget focuses on women-only research; findings based on male subjects are extrapolated to women even though women bear a disproportionate burden of death and disability from heart disease. On average, women are diagnosed years later<\/a> than men.
Nearly four in five<\/a> autoimmune patients are women. The reason for such a high prevalence among women? Unknown. Answering this question would inform development of new treatments and therapeutics that could save millions of lives. Yet the commitment to research is negligible.
Typical drug dosages assigned to women are based on a man\u2019s average weight and metabolism and derived from data from male-only drug trials, though women are at twice the risk<\/a> for adverse drug reactions than men.
This is a shameful legacy of Democratic and Republican administrations alike. <\/p>\n

… We must never take our eyes off the NIH prize, given that the agency is the largest funder of biomedical research in the world. <\/p>\n

Did you know women were mostly excluded<\/a> from federally funded clinical trials until, wait for it, 1993? (As the comedian Samantha Bee puts it<\/a> in her one-woman show, How to Survive Menopause<\/em><\/a>: That\u2019s just one Justin Bieber lifetime ago.)
In the decades since, no more than 8.8 percent<\/a> of NIH grant spending has gone to women\u2019s health research. Even as the agency\u2019s overall funding increased, the allocation to women\u2019s health decreased<\/em> proportionately.
Commitments by the private sector are equally appalling.
According to Deloitte, women\u2019s health represents just 2 percent<\/a> of the more than $41 billion in healthcare venture funding.
About 2 percent<\/a> of all charitable giving goes to nonprofit organizations focused on improving outcomes for women and girls.
It is time for a change. No doubt the federal landscape will continue to pose challenges under the Trump administration, but we must never take our eyes off the NIH prize, given that the agency is the largest funder of biomedical research in the world.
That said, we could be closer to closing the research gap than we realize\u2014and doing so in a way that bypasses the standard pitfalls of venture and nonprofit models, which inevitably include conflicts of interest and notoriously slow timelines.
One of the authors of this column, Katy Brodsky Falco, is the founder and executive director of the Foundation for Women\u2019s Health<\/a>, which has developed a novel approach to leverage small philanthropic contributions for targeted grants with simpler processes, which are awarded to world-class scientists working only in the most underfunded areas of women\u2019s health. No doubt, multi-million contributions from billionaires are a boon. But a six-figure tranche of funds can also be transformative if deployed to fund innovative research deemed too risky for commercial capital and then leveraged to efficiently develop better therapeutics and diagnostics for women.
Ditto for using findings to improve training and professional licensing for doctors, who too often aren\u2019t adequately educated to diagnose, let alone treat, women. This is exactly what the Foundation for Women\u2019s Health is doing.
When it comes to women\u2019s health and lives, now is definitely the time to think big\u2014and that necessarily entails doing more with smaller dollars. Yes, we must press for equitable federal funding, which means voting for candidates who prioritize equity in public health and treating that commitment as non-negotiable. And yes, we must also lean on philanthropic leaders like Melinda French Gates to lead by example.
Ultimately, it means invoking every avenue of support to ease women\u2019s burden of disease. It is well past time to end the era of sidelining and undermining women\u2019s health, which we all should agree is a national disgrace.
Look to these trusted groups if you or a loved one needs to know more about reliable abortion care:<\/em><\/strong>
Ms.<\/em> is wholly owned and published by the Feminist Majority Foundation<\/a><\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

More Than A Magazine, A Movement Originally published by The Contrarian.Last week\u2019s announcement of a $215 million contribution by Melinda French Gates in support of women\u2019s health couldn\u2019t have come at a more urgent moment\u2014especially considering Wednesday, June 10, was Equal Research Day, marking the anniversary of the day in 1993 when women were finally required to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23234,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}