Transcript

EMMA ROSS

There’s some really good excuses for not using females in research studies. So for example the menstrual cycle. To account for that, you have to make sure that you’re testing all the females in your study at the same time of the menstrual cycle. Now contrary to popular belief, women don’t sync menstrual cycles however much time they spend together.

So that’s really difficult and it means your experiment takes more time. If you’re really going to understand the female’s response to your study, your intervention, then you would need to look at her across different time points of the menstrual cycle when her hormones are at significantly different levels. And of course that means collecting more data and so it takes more time and that adds more cost.

And again, the menstrual cycle proves challenging because if you’re really going to investigate it properly, you need to measure the levels of the hormones as they fluctuate across the cycle. And that involves biochemistry, and that analysis is expensive. So it’s a good excuse, it takes more time and it costs more.

But it’s not a good enough excuse, because otherwise if we just stick to those rules we’re never going to find out enough about women. And the other thing is that we know that women don’t participate as much in research, they don’t come forward as much. So we need to do better at encouraging women into research studies. And then we need to do a better job of including them in our research design and our research funding, so that the outcomes are really useful for the coaches and athletes.