Participation in research
As we started to discuss in comments to last Thursday's post ( "Baby and Back"), women are not proportionately represented in most research. While more than half of all living humans are women, far less than half of research participants are. Most of the disparity is attributed to "willingness to participate" (WTP) in research. While much research on WTP has focused on racial and ethnic differences (see Tuskegee project for a damn good reason), the continuing differences by gender led in 1990 to the founding of the Society for Women's Health Research, a major player in the passing of the 1993 NIH Revitalization Act (amended 2001) which mandated the inclusion of women and minorities in clinical research.
Despite these efforts, differences persist. Ramasubbu et al's 2001 analysis concluded that the Revitalization Act was ineffective in the years 1993-1999. More recently, examination of the causes of women's lower enrollment has implicated age differences in the patient groups and greater perception of risk involved in participation (see Murthy et al, 2004; Ding et al, 2007).
Oh, my brilliant and incisive readers, I bet I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: "what about psychological research, Dan4th?" Okay, maybe you're not thinking that: I was. I didn't find anything worth mentioning. One of my classmates last month mentioned something she'd read suggesting that women had traditionally been overrepresented in psychological research, possibly because they were more emotionally responsive to experimental manipulation. That didn't ring true to me, because I was aware of the underrepresentation of women in clinical trials, but it's a good point that they're entirely different phenomena.
At any rate: I haven't participated in any clinical trials. Shame on me! I signed up for a local "match-subjects-to-studies" service a couple of years ago, but my various medical conditions exclude me from most research. I kept meaning to get in on HIV vaccine trials a couple of years ago, but I just never got around to it. "I probably would have been excluded anyway" is not a very good excuse.
Note: My vacation starts on Friday. I will be taking two weeks off for travel.
Despite these efforts, differences persist. Ramasubbu et al's 2001 analysis concluded that the Revitalization Act was ineffective in the years 1993-1999. More recently, examination of the causes of women's lower enrollment has implicated age differences in the patient groups and greater perception of risk involved in participation (see Murthy et al, 2004; Ding et al, 2007).
Oh, my brilliant and incisive readers, I bet I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: "what about psychological research, Dan4th?" Okay, maybe you're not thinking that: I was. I didn't find anything worth mentioning. One of my classmates last month mentioned something she'd read suggesting that women had traditionally been overrepresented in psychological research, possibly because they were more emotionally responsive to experimental manipulation. That didn't ring true to me, because I was aware of the underrepresentation of women in clinical trials, but it's a good point that they're entirely different phenomena.
At any rate: I haven't participated in any clinical trials. Shame on me! I signed up for a local "match-subjects-to-studies" service a couple of years ago, but my various medical conditions exclude me from most research. I kept meaning to get in on HIV vaccine trials a couple of years ago, but I just never got around to it. "I probably would have been excluded anyway" is not a very good excuse.
Note: My vacation starts on Friday. I will be taking two weeks off for travel.