Since the 1970s, people have been complaining of the problem of gender bias in clinical trials; the typical trial patient is a young, white male. Data produced from this is then used to generalise for the whole population. This is problematic because metabolism, behaviours, environmental experience and responses to stressful events vary between genders.
Furthermore, the dichotomy of sex and gender can cause problems in medicine - biological and social aspects cannot be treated as the same. If we accept that gender is a social construct and we’re all ‘doing gender’ by conforming to what we believe to be masculine or feminine behaviours, this can’t be taken as the same as someone’s sex. Their biology is distinctly separate from their gender, and should be treated as such. Let’s take an example which (unusually) favours women over men:
It’s a regularly reported fact that depression is twice as common in women than in men in the western world. This has been put down to a difference in living conditions, experiences and hormonal effects of estrogen and progesterone. However, when research was being done between the 50s and the 80s, with women known to be more depressed, more women were trialed, so results and hypotheses were created broadly in regards to women. Despite this, the same diagnostic approaches are used for all genders. It’s been shown that even when men and women score the same in depression tests, women are more likely to get a diagnosis of depression than men. More critical research is needed in regards to gender and mental illness, such as the use, misuse and side-effects of taking medication in relation to gender.
Max Gerald.
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