Why science has failed women (and how we can change it right now)

As a predoctoral researcher, I study the aging of hematopoietic stem cells – the cells responsible for regenerating all our blood throughout life–. A few years ago, while observing these cells under a microscope, I noticed some strange differences between my samples. They were supposed to behave identically, as they all came from donors of the same age, but this was not the case. I remember a thought coming to my mind: "Are these donors of the same sex?" . Until that moment, I had never asked myself this question. When I started reading the scientific literature, I realized this wasn't just my blind spot. For centuries, both basic research and modern medicine have operated under the premise of the "standard human": the Reference Man. This wasn't done as a conspiracy theory to exclude women from research, but out of a combination of convenience and practicality. Early medical researchers used military records of healthy male soldiers as a baseline; furthermore, scientists actively avoided studying female individuals, claiming that fluctuations in menstrual hormones would distort the data. This bias was so profound that, even in basic research, female mice were systematically excluded.