One of my buddies is in
New Product Development
at a major
pharmaceutical company.
The drugs in her portfolio
are promoted to
both men AND women.
Yet almost all of those drugs
have been tested
exclusively on men.
She doesn’t know
if they work for woman.
Caroline Criado Perez,
author of
Invisible Women:
Data Bias in a World
Designed for Men,
shares
“When it comes to drugs,
for example,
we’ve found sex differences
in every single organ
in the body
and sex differences
down to a cellular level.
We just don’t know
the extent to which
those sex differences
are interacting
with the medical treatments
we receive,
which, to me,
is an absolute scandal.
I found it very shocking
and worrying in one study
that looked at male and female cells
and exposed them
both
to estrogen and to a virus.
The female cell was able to
use the estrogen
to fight off the virus,
and the male cell wasn’t able to
use the estrogen
and the virus took over.
That was so tantalizing
and also so infuriating
because the vast majority
of human cell studies
are still done on male cells.
When you look at a study like that,
you can’t help thinking about
how many more treatments
we have ruled out
at the cell stage
because we only tested it
on male cells.
That virus study is very suggestive
of what could be,
especially if we take that together
with the fact that
a huge problem with drugs
for women
is when the drug
simply doesn’t work.”
Are you selling your products
to both men and women?
If yes,
did you TEST your products
on both men and women?