The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day on 8th March is #AccelerateAction. We spent some time interviewing three female researchers from the Cambridge BRC to see how they thought research could take up and champion this year’s theme….
To ‘Accelerate Action’ for women in research, we need to relentlessly continue our focus on inclusivity. By involving everyone in research, including people who traditionally haven’t been involved we can make a real difference. Research can be part of everyone’s job and by maintaining this idea, we will see a more inclusive approach to research. We will see real change. We will see learning accelerate and we’ll advance our ideas about how we approach research and how we do research. That will be a catalyst for change, it will ‘Accelerate Action’ and move everything forward.
One way to ‘Accelerate Action’ for women would be to consider inclusion in the research participant pool and think about how the research can affect the people included. There have been different research studies over the years that have included just men as participants and then made conclusions about women, which actually didn’t hold true. Women can respond differently to different drugs or they may have different conditions and we know for certain conditions; more women have them than men and vice versa.
We also need to think about varied and full representation of women in studies, for example, menstruating women can have different physical responses to women who have finished the menopause. Age can play a role in varying responses; things can really change with age. We therefore really have to think about not over generalising and including women from different stages of the life cycle. With careful consideration, we can really drive forward research inclusion which in turn would ‘Accelerate Action’ for women.
One thing that could ‘Accelerate Action’ that’s specific to my work and something I feel really strongly about is inclusion. In clinical trials, we often exclude women who are pregnant or of childbearing age. For some drugs or interventions that’s a very reasonable thing to do, because there is potential to cause harm to an unborn baby, but often these women are excluded because that’s just what has always been done.
This leads to huge problems in a health setting we have to treat pregnant women with particular health conditions, but with very little or often no evidence or data on how to treat them, as they were excluded from trials. Care, therefore may end up being not quite as good as it could be.Initially women were excluded from COVID vaccine trials until the growing realisation that they are going to need these vaccines too.. In my own clinical work, I always really study my protocols and consider whether I really must exclude pregnant women.
This is compounded by the fact that many women with young children or caring responsibilities self-exclude from clinical trials, even when the protocol doesn’t specifically exclude women. They may feel it is just too much to add into their daily lives.
I suppose I’m sending out a call to action to all those designing studies to think inclusively. You need to have a really good reason why you’re not including those patients, facilitate participation and come up with some creative ways to enable women to take part in trials. For example, you can now do decentralized studies. So you don’t actually have to come up to hospital for a visit, you could do a home video call and then have the blood tests done locally. These would be great ways to not only ‘Accelerate Action’ but improve research data on women.
To learn more about International Women’s Day click here
The NIHR Cambridge BRC is part of the NIHR and hosted by Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in partnership with the University of Cambridge. We are at the heart of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, Europe’s largest health research area.
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