Emily Kwong

Hey, shortwavers.

Emily Kwong here with shortwave's intern, Aru Nair.

Hi, Emily.

Hi.

And Angela Zhang, who has joined our team through the Stanford Health Equity Media Fellowship and is an actual doctor.

Good to have you.

Now, Aru, I hear you have a medical fact you wanted to share with us.

And you're saying it wasn't mandatory for women to be included in those until the 1990s?

Oh, so they just excluded most women.

Today on the show, how we sort the sexes in medicine and why there's a lot of problems with that.

You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

Okay, Aru and Angelo, today we're talking about sex differences as it relates to the world of medicine, medical care, medical research.

And I remember from a previous episode that our colleague Hannah Chin reported learning

that sex is hard to define.

It can be defined, in fact, by a lot of things like anatomy or hormones or chromosomes.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

So how do researchers or doctors account for this complexity in sex?

Right.

I mean, I'm 5'8", and there are plenty of men who are my exact height.