Angela Zhang

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?

Wait, medical trials like drug trials?

People who took the drug while pregnant ended up having babies whose limbs were poorly developed or even absent.

This happened to over 12,000 kids.

And it led to the Food and Drug Administration creating a policy excluding, quote, women of childbearing potential in early drug trials.

That was in 1977.

Yeah, exactly.

But that's not the only reason that women have been historically excluded from biomedical research.

And Congress listened.

They passed a law in 1993 requiring researchers to include women and people of color in federally funded medical trials.

Wow.

Nice.

And before we go further, we just want to say that we're using women and men in super binary ways because many studies and experts still use these terms, even though we know that gender and even sex are not binary.

The first one is that we might be missing similarities between the pink and the blue buckets.

In many cases, there's a lot of overlap, like with height, for example.

This is Donna Maney.

She's a neuroscientist at Emory University.

Totally.

So Donna says ignoring the overlaps between sexes could have real consequences, like in women who experience heart attacks.

How so?