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When I began studying the neural circuitry underlying spatial navigation in the fall of 2019, I expected that my experimental trajectory would be fairly straightforward: read up on what others had done before me, find the gaps, and try to fill them. But as I started my research, it became clear that there was one gap that was much bigger than I had anticipated. In seeking a research focus, a new question had appeared: Where are the women?
The past decade has seen gains in the number of female subjects included in biomedical research trials. According to a bibliometric analysis that came out last year, 49 percent of mammalian biological studies published in 2019 reported testing on both males and females, up from only 28 percent in 2009. That’s a hopeful statistic. But a third of all research studies that included both male and ...
