How the Ambien Dosing Scandal Changed Women's Medicine

And Revealed Decades of Gender Bias in Medicine

According to the Institute of Medicine, every cell in our bodies has a sex—meaning men and women are different at a cellular level. This isn't just a fun fact, it has profound implications for how diseases, medicines, and chemicals affect our bodies and present themselves symptomatically.

Yet despite this biological reality, the medical establishment has maintained a storied tradition of ignoring women in health research.

A History of Exclusion

A lot of people don’t know this, but women were not included in clinical trials until 1993. Let that sink in—half the population wasn't represented in studies for medications that are meant be safe for the entire population. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) finally mandated the inclusion of women and minorities (after much protesting and advocacy by women in the field) in research that year, but the problem ran even deeper than human trials.

Even female lab animals weren't part of the research equation! Scientists often used exclusively male mice and rats in preclinical studies, creating a gender bias from the very beginning of the research process.

For years, experts urged both the NIH and FDA to make sex differences a mandatory consideration in health research. These recommendations largely fell on deaf ears—until 2013, when both organizations suddenly announced new policies to incorporate sex differences into research protocols.

What finally triggered this change after decades of resistance? A sleeping pill named Ambien.

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