Gloria Steinem is the American feminist writer and organiser whose decades of activism helped reshape women’s health research in the United States, pushing regulators to stop treating the male body as the default test subject. Her campaigning, alongside sympathetic doctors and lawmakers, fed directly into a 1993 law that forced federally funded trials to include women. That one change still shapes how new medicines and diseases get studied today.
Key Takeaways
- Gloria Steinem, now 92, has spent over five decades pushing back against the exclusion of women from clinical studies.
- Her advocacy, and that of allied doctors and lawmakers, fed into the creation of the NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health in 1990.
- The 1993 NIH Revitalization Act legally required women and minorities to be included in federally funded clinical trials.
- India’s research bodies are only now catching up, with ICMR ethical guidelines pushing for better female representation in trials.
Who Is Gloria Steinem, and Why Does Women’s Health Research Matter to Her?
Most people know Gloria Steinem as the co-founder of Ms. magazine in 1972, the publication that gave American second-wave feminism a national voice. What gets less attention is how much of that magazine’s early reporting was devoted to health — abortion access, birth control safety, and the simple observation that doctors often didn’t know how drugs behaved in female bodies because nobody had bothered to test them there.
Steinem herself has said in interviews over the years that the women’s movement was never just about the workplace or the ballot box. It was about the exam room too. If a woman couldn’t get accurate information about her own body, every other freedom felt incomplete.
How Were Women Excluded From Medical Research Before Steinem’s Campaigns?
This is the part that shocks people when they hear it for the first time. For most of the twentieth century, major American drug and disease trials simply left women out. The Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial on heart disease, run in the late 1970s, studied over 12,000 men and zero women. The famous Physicians’ Health Study that established aspirin’s protective effect against heart attacks used more than 22,000 male doctors as its subjects.
Regulators made this worse, not better. In 1977, the US Food and Drug Administration issued guidance that actively barred women of “childbearing potential” from early-phase drug trials, citing fears about unknown effects on a possible pregnancy. The result was a generation of medicines approved on data drawn almost entirely from men, then prescribed to everyone.
What Changed Because of Gloria Steinem’s Activism?
Steinem didn’t do this alone, and she has never claimed to. But she was one of the loudest, most persistent voices connecting feminist politics to women’s health research at a moment when the two were rarely spoken of in the same sentence. Her Ms. Foundation for Women funded studies and advocacy groups working on exactly this gap.
The pressure built through the 1980s. Congresswomen Patricia Schroeder and Olympia Snowe, working through the bipartisan Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, commissioned a 1990 Government Accountability Office report that confirmed what activists had been saying for years: NIH policy on including women in trials existed on paper but wasn’t being enforced. That same year, under the first female NIH director, Dr Bernadine Healy, the agency created the Office of Research on Women’s Health. Three years later, the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993 turned that office’s mission into federal law, mandating that women and minorities be included in NIH-funded clinical research.
The “If Men Could Menstruate” Essay
One of Steinem’s most quoted pieces of writing, a short 1978 essay imagining a world where menstruation was a male experience, wasn’t really about periods. It was about whose bodily functions get studied, funded, and taken seriously by medicine, and whose get dismissed as inconvenient or embarrassing. That argument became a quiet blueprint for the later push to fund research into menopause, endometriosis, and other conditions that had been chronically under-studied.
What Does This Mean for Women’s Health Research Today?
The gap didn’t close overnight, and in some areas it still hasn’t closed. Heart attack symptoms in women are still frequently missed in emergency rooms because textbook descriptions were written around male presentations. Menopause research remained so underfunded for so long that only in the last few years has a wave of “femtech” startups and venture money rushed in to fill the vacuum. Steinem, well into her nineties now, has continued to point out that funding follows attention, and attention has historically followed men.
How Does India’s Women’s Health Research Compare?
India has its own version of this story, running on a slightly delayed timeline. The Indian Council of Medical Research updated its National Ethical Guidelines in 2017, explicitly pushing sponsors and investigators to ensure trials reflect the population that will actually use the drug, including women across different life stages. Before that, Indian clinical research largely mirrored the Western pattern, with male-dominated trial cohorts even for conditions like diabetes and hypertension that affect both sexes differently.
The practical gap shows up in everyday prescribing. Dosage guidance for common sedatives and cardiac drugs, originally calibrated on Western male-heavy datasets, has had to be revisited as more India-specific data on women’s metabolism and body composition slowly comes in. It’s a smaller-scale echo of exactly the problem Steinem spent decades arguing against in Washington.
| Year | Milestone |
| 1972 | Steinem co-founds Ms. magazine, opening space for feminist health reporting |
| 1977 | FDA guidance excludes women of childbearing age from early-phase drug trials |
| 1990 | NIH creates the Office of Research on Women’s Health |
| 1993 | NIH Revitalization Act legally mandates inclusion of women in funded trials |
| 2017 | ICMR issues updated ethical guidelines pushing Indian trials toward gender balance |
FAQ
What did Gloria Steinem actually do for women’s health research?
She used her platform as a feminist organiser and Ms. magazine co-founder to campaign, fund advocacy, and pressure lawmakers, contributing to the political climate that produced the 1990 NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health and the 1993 Revitalization Act.
Why were women left out of clinical trials in the first place?
Researchers cited hormonal fluctuations complicating data and fears of harming a potential pregnancy. In practice, this meant decades of drugs and disease research were based almost entirely on male bodies.
Is Gloria Steinem still active today?
Yes. Now 92, she remains a public voice on feminist and health issues, though she is less involved in day-to-day organising than in her Ms. magazine years.
Has India adopted similar protections for women’s health research?
Partially. ICMR’s 2017 ethical guidelines encourage gender-balanced trial populations, but enforcement and data collection still lag behind the US framework Steinem helped build.
What women’s health gaps still exist despite these reforms?
Menopause, autoimmune conditions, and heart disease symptom recognition in women remain comparatively under-researched, even after three decades of legal requirements for inclusion.
Conclusion
Gloria Steinem’s fight was never only about politics or the workplace; it reached straight into the exam room and the drug trial. The laws that followed her advocacy still decide, today, whether the medicine a woman takes was ever actually tested on someone like her.