Aru Nair

Hey, Emily.

It's so good to be here.

Yeah, partially.

And these trials are really important.

The NIH is the largest single public funder of biomedical research in the world.

Like, I'm a doctor, right?

So I'm constantly looking at results of research on different drugs or treatments.

And this helps me decide if a test or medicine I'm using is safe or effective for my patients.

Yeah, we probably need some backstory here.

So there was this global scandal starting in the late 1950s where tens of thousands of pregnant women, mainly in Europe, took this sedative called thalidomide for morning sickness.

So that's Marina DeMarco.

She's a philosopher of science at Washington University in St.

Louis.

And she told us that over time, scientists and activists realized that there was this huge gap in data for research on women.

They started pushing for more inclusive policies, and there were even protests about this in the 1980s and 90s.

Now, women are in a lot more studies.

And we study differences between the sexes by enrolling men and women, and then we compare data from each group.

But many people say the way we include women in medical research can still get pretty messy.

So many things.

And Marina says that confusion can carry over into how sex is defined when you're a patient in a doctor's office.