Editor's note

For years, women were excluded from clinical trials as it was thought their monthly cycles would complicate results. This meant the treatments prescribed to women had never been tested for them. As Deb Colville writes in the first article of our series on Gender Medicine: “Women were excluded because they are different, but the results were applied to them because they are nearly the same.”

Women and men are different in many ways, but doctors and researchers have only recently started applying a gender lens to treatment and diagnosis – and there’s a long way to go. Today’s second article outlines how women have evolved to have stronger immune systems, and viruses like the flu see men as the weaker sex. But this has come with downsides for women, in that more are likely to suffer autoimmune disease. Our six articles this week will look at how gender differences impact health start from the womb and go on to manifest themselves in the areas of mental health, immunity, heart disease and bone health.

Sasha Petrova

Deputy Editor, Health + Medicine

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For a long time, medication dosages were adjusted for patient size and women were simply ‘small men’. Shutterstock/The Conversation

Medicine's gender revolution: how women stopped being treated as 'small men'

Deb Colville, Monash University

In medical training and practice, gender differences have at last become a vital part of diagnosis and treatment.

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