“Why Didn’t I Know This?”
I have just transferred to one of Yale’s new residential colleges, named for Pauli Murray, an American civil rights lawyer, activist, and source of immeasurable progress for women, black people, and other oppressed groups. Though it is my senior year, I decided to make the big change of moving further away from central campus into these sprawling, uncharted towers in their inaugural year as a dedication to Pauli Murray and as a celebration of her memorialization.
But as I write in this spacious, air-conditioned, brand new room of my own, it is not with the same rush of joy that I felt when I heard that one college would be named for Pauli Murray and another for Grace Hopper, Yale Mathematics graduate and engineer of one of the first computers in the world. That joy is tempered as I linger on the fact that of Yale’s 14 residential colleges — where undergraduates live, eat, socialize, exercise, and more — only two are named for women, and both were named only in the last year.
We are living in a moment in which some “Hidden Figures” are beginning to take form, featured in an award-winning movie about black female mathematicians at NASA, engraved on the stone walls of Yale’s colleges, or printed in the newer editions of text books. Still, so many more figures remain hazy, forgotten, or hidden. As a woman interested in medicine and health, I must wonder who has been hidden and forgotten in my field, why, and what the effects have been.
I have really only started to think formally about this after becoming a part of Women’s Health Research at Yale (WHRY), an organization dedicated to furthering research for women and communicating research-based information about sex and gender differences in health and disease to the general public.
It is through WHRY that I’ve learned it was only in 1994 that the United States implemented a federal law requiring researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to include women as well as men in clinical studies and analyze their results by sex or gender. The NIH is the world’s single largest funder of biomedical research. Before this mandate, researchers were not held to a strict standard that required them to include women. And it was only just last year that studies funded with federal money were required to use female animals, tissues and cells.
What took so long? And why was I not even aware that such a gap existed?
This gap in my knowledge is the reason for this blog, Why Didn’t I Know This? I think it goes beyond me — sex and gender differences are still not widely addressed in medical schools and much less commonly understood by the general public. Why Didn’t I Know This? will be a space to share information about aspects of health disproportionately affecting women and those that vary by sex and gender. It will also be a space to explore possibilities for the future. Where do we go from here, and how can we make sure that medical research is the best it can be for everyone?
I’ll be sharing a collection of ideas, scientific findings, news, and interviews in the hopes of sparking thought, dialogue, and action. I will share my passions — as a woman, a college student applying to medical schools, a millennial, a concerned citizen, and a believer in the power of knowledge. I hope you will join the conversation as well. There is a lot more to learn and much more conversation to be had about sex and gender in health and medicine, and I am excited to begin this journey with you.
