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Notes -
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:
Biden used this argument to call for more funding for women's health research:
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...
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.
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:
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.
I think that Biden may have been imprecisely referencing the idea that many 'gender neutral' medical studies are done only on men (classically because you get less variance if the subjects are more similar to each other so picking one gender for subjects is good, and it should be men because women might be pregnant or their cycle might introduce variance).
The classic example, which for all I know may be apocryphal, is that women having heart attacks present with slightly different symptoms than men having heart attacks. But most studies done on heart attack symptoms used men as subjects, leading doctors to not recognize women having heart attacks when reporting their symptoms some larger percent of the time.
Autism is another example, women with autism/aspergers didn't match the DSM criteria which were designed around mostly male subjects, and took a while to be recognized and receive treatment at the same rates.
And I stress, all of that is basically folk wisdom I've received from mostly cultural sources, it might be an old wive's tale for all I know. But it's a commonly-cited concept on the left, and makes sense as something he could be referencing.
Also, I don't think it follows that men having higher disease burden means men's health should receive more of the gendered medical research funding. It may mean that men should get more healtchare funding.
But it's quite possible that
In fact, it's even possible that the 'gender neutral funding' covers gender neutral conditions that affect more men than women, in a way that makes the overall research funding more beneficial towards men overall (not saying we have evidence of that, just that the data you've presented doesn't rule it out)
Tangential, but I find this strange. It's a condition that we don't know the cause of, nor is there anything like a lab test or imaging to confirm it. It's all based on observed behavior.
For males there's one set of behaviors that are used to confirm diagnosis, and for females another.
How can you make the determination that this is actually the same condition?
Science has moved past your statements. We now know many genetic variations which lead to testably differing neurologies and predictable personality traits. The baseline differences between male and female result in different behaviors stemming from the shared differences from neurotypical neurology.
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