Differences Matter

Aristotle is said to have referred to the female as a mutilated male, and this philosophy seems to have carried forward into much more modern times.

In 1977, official FDA guidelines recommended that women of “childbearing potential” be excluded from early stage clinical trials. Men, particularly white men, were considered the ideal model, from which the success and side effects of any particular treatment could be judged. Somehow, women’s menstrual cycles made them too difficult to study, while simultaneously being irrelevant to the results. The thalidomide tragedy quite reasonably brought fet...