Senate to Hold First-Ever Congressional Hearing on Menopause as Women's Health Research Funding Lags
核心洞察
The Senate Special Committee on Aging (搜索) will convene Congress' first-ever hearing devoted to menopause (搜索) on Sept. 16, led by ranking member Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.
Women's health research accounted for just 7.9 percent of total NIH funding in 2023, and closing the gap would require an additional $15.71 billion over five years.
Researchers have documented that women report adverse drug reactions 52 percent more often than men, with serious or fatal reactions occurring 36 percent more often since 2000.
The Senate Special Committee on Aging (搜索) will hold Congress' first-ever hearing devoted to menopause (搜索) on Sept. 16, a session titled "Half the Country, Zero Hearings: Meeting the Moment to End the Menopause Care Gap in America." Led by ranking member Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), the hearing will examine the nation's lack of menopause research, informed medical care and provider training, and make the case for greater federal investment.
Among those testifying is Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, executive director of Ms. partnerships and strategy, executive director of the Birnbaum Women's Leadership Center at NYU Law (搜索), and author of the forthcoming book When in Menopause (搜索): A User's Manual and Citizen's Guide.
The hearing arrives against a backdrop of decades of structural exclusion of women from medical research. For much of the 20th century, researchers justified excluding women by citing concerns about pregnancy and hormonal differences, while assuming findings in men could be generalized to women. The male body became medicine's default; women were treated as the exception or as smaller men. It was not until the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993 that federally funded clinical trials were required to include women.
Persistent Funding and Diagnostic Gaps
Changing who participates in research has not rewritten decades of medical knowledge. In 2023, women's health research still accounted for just 7.9 percent of the NIH's total research funding, even as the agency's overall budget continued to grow. Research from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (搜索) indicates that closing the gap would require an additional $15.71 billion in federal funding over five years—roughly doubling the NIH's current investment in women's health research.
The Biden administration sought to reverse the trend by announcing the first-ever White House Initiative on Women's Health Research in 2024. The article further reports that in 2025 the Trump administration proposed cutting the NIH's budget by roughly 43 percent, equivalent to $20 billion per year, and that its broader HHS budget proposal called for eliminating or consolidating several programs supporting family planning and maternal and child health. Federal agencies also came under pressure to scrutinize or reject grant proposals containing terms such as women, leading to paused or cancelled fellowships and research on conditions such as uterine fibroids (搜索) and pregnancy.
The clinical consequences of male-centered evidence are measurable. Cardiovascular disease (搜索) is the leading cause of death for American women, yet for decades physicians were taught to recognize a heart attack using the "classic" symptom most commonly observed in men: crushing chest pain. Women, however, often experience shortness of breath, nausea and extreme fatigue. Today, women are 50 percent more likely to receive an initial misdiagnosis after a heart attack—an error that can often mean the difference between life and death.
Similar disparities extend to therapeutics. Historically, many prescription drugs were tested primarily in men before reaching the market, despite well-established biological differences in hormones, body fat percentage and metabolism. These differences were often overlooked when determining whether medications were safe, effective and appropriately dosed for women. Since 2000, women have reported adverse drug reactions 52 percent more frequently than men, with serious or fatal reactions occurring 36 percent more often.
Questioning the Rationale for Exclusion
Parallel work in exercise physiology has directly challenged the assumptions used to justify excluding women from studies. Writing in The Conversation, an exercise physiology researcher describes how uncertainty over how to account for menstruation or hormonal birth control led investigators to include fewer women or none at all—based on assumptions that turned out to be incorrect. These practices persisted not only in older studies but in research conducted over the past 20 years.
A key finding broke the logjam in the field: menstrual cycles typically do not have significant impact on blood vessel function, nor are there meaningful muscle and performance differences between women using hormonal birth control and those who are not. Those results helped researchers move past a 1995 study that had found the opposite and that had typically been cited as the reason for excluding women because the variables seemed too complex and impractical to resolve.
In 2018, a new look into the validity of that reasoning came from graduate students Ninette Shenouda and Stacey Priest, who were curious about these bedrock assumptions. The team measured variables studied in their work, such as the health of blood vessels and the heart in exercise, and assessed whether they were affected by the time of the menstrual cycle or the oral contraceptive cycle. There were no significant day-to-day differences. Similar findings have now been made in several other areas of exercise physiology, including the impact of menstrual cycle phase on responses to resistance exercise training.
The researcher notes that the field had been leaving women out for no reason, and that no one had bothered to check whether that was justified. The result is a major knowledge gap: it remains unclear in which areas men and women are very similar and where they may be very different. The researcher points to heart attack research as an example of what becomes possible once assumptions are questioned—symptoms and outcomes can vary widely between women and men, and awareness of these differences is improving care for women and men alike.
Toward Sex-Inclusive Research and Care
The article argues that strengthening requirements for sex- and gender-inclusive clinical research beyond current NIH policies is a necessary step, ensuring women are represented not only in participation but in analysis, reporting and drug development. Inclusion, it states, cannot end with recruitment—it must shape every stage of research.
Beyond clinical trials, the article calls for women's health to be treated as a core component of medicine rather than a separate specialty, noting that women's health extends far beyond reproductive care yet is too often viewed through that narrow lens. Medical education should teach sex-based differences across every field of medicine, and clinical practice should incorporate that evidence into everyday patient care. The article concludes that correcting these failures will require a bipartisan commitment to making women's health a permanent priority in research, education and clinical care.