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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25510 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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I am kindly asking this knowledgable community to check my data and my argument.

Fact 1

In the 2024 state of the union address Biden said:

Women are more than half of our population but research on women’s health has always been underfunded.

Biden used this argument to call for more funding for women's health research:

That’s why we’re launching the first-ever White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, led by Jill who is doing an incredible job as First Lady. Pass my plan for $12 Billion to transform women’s health research and benefit millions of lives across America!

https://www.whitehouse.gov/state-of-the-union-2024/

Fact 2

The NIH 2017, 2018 and 2019 research budget breakdown is:

  • Gender neutral research: 80% of funding.

  • Women's health research: 14% of funding.

  • Men's health research: 6% of funding.

Source: Report of the Advisory Committee on Research on Women’s Health: 2017–2019, table 8, page 117. https://orwh.od.nih.gov/sites/orwh/files/docs/ORWH_BiennialReport2019_20_508.pdf

In other words, Biden was not saying the truth because at least in 2017, 2018 and 2019 women's health research received more than double the funding compared to man's health research.

Note 2.1

83% of all medical research in the US is funded via NIH. The other 17% may be funded via private foundations and organizations, pharmaceutical companies and other for-profit entities, or via state and local governments.

Source: https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/budget

Note 2.2

Funding of the reproductive & maternal care is certainly justified and will be always reported as women's specific research funding - but only about 7%-10% of the women's health research was in the "Reproductive & Maternal/Child/Adolescent Health" category.

Source: Report of the Advisory Committee on Research on Women’s Health: 2017–2019, table 9, page 117. https://orwh.od.nih.gov/sites/orwh/files/docs/ORWH_BiennialReport2019_20_508.pdf

Note 2.3

NIH defines “Women’s health conditions,” as...

...defined in section 141 of the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993 (PublicLaw 103–43), include all diseases, disorders, and conditions:

  • That are unique to, more serious in, or more prevalent in women
  • For which the factors of medical risk or types of medical intervention are different for women or for which it is unknown whether such factors or types are different for women
  • With respect to which there has been insufficient clinical research involving women as subjects or insufficient clinical data on women

Source: Report of the Advisory Committee on Research on Women’s Health: 2021–2022 https://orwh.od.nih.gov/sites/orwh/files/docs/ORWH_Biennial%20Report_121823_1516_F_508c_Optimized.pdf

Note 2.4

After 2019, the NIH has decided to stop calculating data on men's health research funding. This means that it will no longer be possible to show that men's health research is grossly underfunded compared to women's health research. I wonder what the motivation was for this decision.

NIH does not currently calculate or report annual funding associated with projects dedicated solely to men’s health or projects benefiting men and women.

Source: Report of the Advisory Committee on Research on Women’s Health: 2021–2022 https://orwh.od.nih.gov/sites/orwh/files/docs/ORWH_Biennial%20Report_121823_1516_F_508c_Optimized.pdf

Fact 3

Globally men suffer 53.4% of all Burden of Disease.

Global Burden of Disease: https://ghdx.healthdata.org/gbd-2019

Note 3.1

In the US specifically:

Men over the past decade have shown poorer health outcomes than women across all racial and ethnic groups as well as socioeconomic status.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/5986/text?r=16

PS: I do not consider the argument "research on women’s health is underfunded because all health research is underfunded" a good faith argument.

2 things can be true at the same time.

  1. Women's health needs to be studied more because their hormones show large fluctuations every month and over a lifetime. More women take a daily dose of drugs (birth control) than men, and the higher potential for damage requires higher funding for women's health.

  2. In an equal world, women and men are assumed to have the same expected lifespan. The worse outcomes for men suggests that theyre the ones being discriminated against.

For the longest time, our understanding of medicine came from the outcomes on American college students. They tended to be young, male and white. So it is reasonable to expect every other cohort to be less understood. Women are the largest of that cohort that felt left behind, and raising funding for them makes sense. Ofc, the make up of colleges since the 2000s means that this is more so an act of 'correcting the past', than fixing the present.

the make up of colleges since the 2000s

Women outnumbered men in college since the early 80s. I bet most people posting here never lived in an era in which men outnumbered women in college.

Women outnumbered men in enrollment in the late 80s, but didn't outnumber men in degrees until around 2010, as far as I can tell.

Also, a lot of medical knowledge was established before most of us were born, the timeframe doesn't matter if it's treated as established knowledge and hasn't been updated since.

  • -15

Women outnumbered men in degrees around 2010 if you count everyone over age 25 rather than just recently awarded degrees.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/young-men-college-decline-gender-gap-higher-education/620066/

The statistics are stunning. But education experts and historians aren’t remotely surprised. Women in the United States have earned more bachelor’s degrees than men every year since the mid-1980s

Women outnumbered men in degrees awarded per year since the 80s and as older people die off women had most degrees for all adults including elderly retirees in 2010 or so.

So regarding the "makeup of colleges": that's mostly women since the 80s.

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