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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 your argument that women's health was not underfunded in recent years is accurate. People sometimes use the word "always" in a colloquial sense to mean "for ages" or "for a really long time". It's possible that Biden's scriptwriter may have meant something like "research into women's health was underfunded for a really long time, and this is a regrettable oversight which we're only just starting to correct for".
I have no idea whether that claim is accurate: to check, you'd pretty much have to do a deep dive on all the funding allocated by the NIH since its foundation. But if that's what Biden/Biden's scriptwriter meant, I imagine that it could be true.
I think it is accurate to an extent - yes, women's health research WAS underfunded for a long time but apparently the impact wasn't big enough to be reflected in the burden of disease, 53% of which is carried by men.
We know why the burden of disease is disproportionately carried by men, it’s not a medical mystery. Men have much higher risk tolerance and lower inhibition, so are more likely to take physical risks and are more likely to try and become addicted to harmful substances like drugs and alcohol which cause many diseases that shorten life expectancy.
This is a good point, but do we know WHY do men have much higher risk tolerance and lower inhibition?
Moreover, in today's political climate, don't we want to achieve equal outcome? If the factors are biological, then we need health research funding to achieve equal outcomes. If the factors are social, then we need health research funding and social programs to achieve equal outcomes.
Mind you, almost all dangerous jobs are done by men. Chemical exposure, mental stress, transportation - you name it.
The greater male variability hypothesis and the related cluster of explanations is still the best theory I've seen bandied around for this.
The Y chromosome has a much higher mutation rate and its presence determines sex, which makes men the volatile and unstable genetic testing ground, and women the selectors and carriers of the successful experiments.
Of course it's a lot more complicated and nuanced than that at the margins. But I think the broad idea is sound. And it coheres with the behavioral traits you name because this specialization ties us into opposite behavioral strategies as to how much we desire to conform to social norms.
It remains to be seen whether this climate is sustainable. Nature does tend to win over moral fads in the long run. It doesn't always do so, but unless technology makes sexual dimorphism truly irrelevant, I think this equalizing is a fool's errand.
What?
No, the reason males are more risk taking is because a male can impregnate multiple females, where as, a female can only be impregnated by one male. So a male has a higher expected return to risk taking mating strategies.
Chickens are the opposite of humans where females have ZW chromosomes and males have ZZ chromosomes; however, roosters are famously aggressive and risk taking. You can't stop them from fighting if enclosed together.
Males are indeed the homogametic sex in the ZW system, but the argument still stands if Z-linked genes evolve faster than W-linked ones, making females more genetically stable, which is actually something we have observed in birds and in snakes.
If we could find a species with a neutral or female biased mutation rate where males still exhibit more risk taking behavior, that would be an issue for this theory, but I don't know of any.
The argument from the economics of reproduction is also sound in my opinion, but it isn't mutually exclusive with the genetic one.
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