The 1990s: The World Wide Web became publicly available on the Internet. Michael Jordan revolutionized sports. McDonald’s opened in Moscow. Two of the country’s top jobs, Secretary of State and Attorney General, were earned by women, Madeline Albright and Janet Reno, respectively. And the National Institutes of Health was asked for the second time to improve the incidence of women included in medical research.

Clinical research is about improving safety and effectiveness in medicine. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that advancements in medical research began taking into consideration women’s bodies and metabolisms. The research that began at the turn of the 20th Century was performed exclusively on men. As a result, women in the United States were routinely prescribed drugs that had not been tested for safety or effectiveness in them.

Since 1993 when Congress handed the NIH stricter guidelines for including women in research, we have learned a lot about women and medicine – from heart disease to hormone replacement – but much more work is needed.

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