Invisible Women: "females received limited benefit"

That’s what University of Calgary researchers argue in a paper published this week in Nature Medicine. […]The University of Calgary team was aware of trials showing dexamethasone only helped some males, but not females. So authors Jeff Biernaskie and Bryan Yipp examined patients at an Alberta hospital, and discovered that the treatment reduced male deaths, but had effectively no benefit for sick females. They call it an “unsettling observation.”

They took blood from COVID patients treated with dexamethasone, and from other hospital patients who didn’t have COVID, for a control group. Complicated lab tests using RNA sequencing and bioinformatics analyzed the patients’ immune responses, and the team says they documented one reaction in men and another in women.

“Males derived benefit from the steroids, and the females, at both the cellular level and at the population level, received limited benefit,” his colleague Yipp said. 

Several US studies from the 1980s to the 2000s have found that women are more likely to make women’s issues a priority and more likely to sponsor women’s issues bills. In the UK, a recent analysis of the impact female MPs have had in Westminster since 1945 found that women are more likely to speak about women’s issues, as well as family policy, education and care. An analysis3 of the impact of female representation across nineteen OECD countries4 between 1960 and 2005 also found that female politicians are more likely to address issues that affect women.

The OECD study also found that women’s words translated into action. As female political representation increased in Greece, Portugal and Switzerland, these countries experienced an increase in educational investment. Conversely, as the proportion of female legislators in Ireland, Italy and Norway decreased in the late 1990s, those countries experienced ‘a comparable drop in educational expenditures as a percentage of GDP’. As little as a single percentage point rise in female legislators was found to increase the ratio of educational expenditure. Similarly, a 2004 Indian study of local councils in West Bengal and Rajasthan found that reserving one- third of the seats for women increased investment in infrastructure related to women’s needs. A 2007 paper looking at female repre- sentation in India between 1967 and 2001 also found that a 10% increase in female political representation resulted in a 6% increase in ‘the probability that an individual attains primary education in an urban area’.

Women are 73% more likely to be injured and 17% more likely to die in a car crash than men. The U.S. allows companies to crash-test cars with dummies based on a 1970s average male, and the government’s 5-star safety rating doesn’t require testing for women in the driver’s seat position. More equal testing standards and new crash test technology could save thousands of lives and prevent needless injuries.