Annaliese Beery

Who they are

The 2011 paper lists Beery as a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the University of California, San Francisco.

This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

Sex bias in neuroscience and biomedical research (2011), with Irving Zucker. The review notes that the US National Institutes of Health required women to be enrolled in human clinical trials in 1993 but that no similar initiative then existed for female animals. Reviewing research on mammals in ten biological fields for 2009, with their historical precedents, the authors found male bias in eight. It was most prominent in neuroscience, where single-sex studies of male animals outnumbered those of females by 5.5 to 1. Over the previous half-century, male bias in non-human studies had increased while it declined in human studies. Studies of both sexes frequently failed to analyse results by sex. The authors also wrote that the belief that female mammals are intrinsically more variable than males, and too troublesome for routine inclusion, is without foundation. They recommended that single-sex studies say so in their titles and that funders favour proposals studying both sexes.

Key ideas

The review shows that the exclusion of females from research did not end with the 1993 law on human trials. Much of the basic biology on which treatments are built was still being worked out in male animals. The NIH policy on sex as a biological variable, which took effect in 2016, addresses the same problem.

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