Fighting the Gender Stereotypes That Warp Biomedical Research
Female animals were once deemed too hormonal and messy for science. Some scientists warn it’s not enough to just use more female lab rats.Hormones in female research subjects have long been blamed for creating “messy” lab results. “Everything is measured to the male scale,” said one neurobiologist.CreditHulton Archive/Getty Images By JoAnna Klein May 30, 2019 Say you are prescribed medication for depression, anxiety or even just to sleep. Would you want to take it if you knew that the drug had only been tested on men and male animals? Rebecca Shansky, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University in Boston, thinks you might not . When she tells nonscientific audiences that researchers “for the most part don’t study female animals, people are blown away,” she said. She added: “It seems like such an obvious thing to a normal person. But when you come up in the academic and science world, it’s like, ‘Oh no, females are so complicated, so we just don’t s...


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