Under the Trump administration, researchers now have a list of hundreds of words to avoid if they want their grants to get approved by federal research agencies.

The New York Times published the list March 7, which they said is most likely incomplete, based on a compilation of government documents. The list includes words like “women,” “pregnant persons,” “gender-affirming care,” “DEI,” “disability,” “females,” “LGBTQ,” “multicultural,” “transgender” and “victims.”

Phaedra Norrell, a seventh-year doctoral candidate studying neuroscience, said funders will search grant applications and toss out those containing these “flag words.”

“It makes me want to do this even more because I don’t want to quit,” Norrell said. “So for me, that’s really the reason, is to keep this moving and to shine a light on the disparities that are happening in women’s health care and to maybe help solve them, even if our administration is not moving in the same direction.”

The 2017 Trump administration banned words as well, focusing on ones that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were not allowed to use.

Past turning points in women’s health research

Norrell, whose research focuses on Alzheimer’s disease, said there has been an explosion in sex differences research over the past decade.

Two of the triggers to this were the Women’s Health Initiative Memory Study, which looked at the effects of hormone therapy on memory and cognitive function in older women, and the Kronos Early Estrogen Prevention Study, which focused on the effects of hormone therapy in recently postmenopausal women.

The National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act came out in 1993, which mandated that women be included in clinical trials, and the NIH also launched the Sex as a Biological Variable Initiative in 2016, which made it required to report the sex of the cells studied in a given experiment.

“Prior to 1993, women were pretty much barred from participating in research studies,” Norrell said. “It was thought that our hormonal cycles would introduce variability into studies that they didn’t want around.”

Sofia Ahmed, president of the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences, said these variabilities were things like menstrual cycles, menopause, pregnancy and hormonal fluctuations, which are seen as “more challenging than the male bodies to include.”

“Throughout history — and we’re talking, like, millennia — women’s bodies have been considered atypical, and men’s bodies are the norm,” Ahmed said.

Norrell said even with new initiatives, women are still subthreshold when it comes to being included in drug trials, leading to a lack of information about how drugs affect men and women differently.

“These detrimental effects definitely can still be seen in modern medicine,” she said. “We already know that there’s latent sex differences in how certain drugs are metabolized, which can actually impact the efficacy of those drugs between the sexes.”

What can be done to progress women’s health research

On campus, Amanda Bretzin, DeWeese Health Center’s health promotion and assessment specialist, said they provide many resources for women.

Some include gynecological exams, breast examination, cervical cancer screenings, evaluation and management of menstrual irregularities or vaginal issues, initiation or continuation of birth control management, general yearly physicals, STI screenings and treatment for mental health.

“We are here to support our students regardless of their gender or sex here on campus,” she said. “We want to make sure that we’re being sensitive when we’re dealing with all of our patients, and just making sure that we’re meeting our patients where they’re at.”

When it comes to diseases like Alzheimer’s, ⅔ of people who have it are women, whereas ⅓ are men. Norrell said the fact that women are still underserved in that research creates a big problem.

“If we don’t take action on this right now, then women of the future and women that are aging currently are going to be at a massive disadvantage,” she said. “And that’s the process that we need to try to stop and that we need to try to change.”

Other treatments for cancer, autoimmune disease and infectious disease treatments also have a lack of research about their efficacy on women.

In the world of health, women experience setbacks, such as having an average time of four to 11 years for an endometriosis diagnosis.

Norrell said even novel therapeutics coming out, like monoclonal antibody treatments, which are a type of immunotherapy treating those diseases, are more effective in men than women.

The Trump administration also recently dropped an emergency abortion case in Idaho, signaling to the state it will let Idaho enforce its abortion ban during medical emergencies, which violates the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act.

“We need to keep making these efforts, even if our government is not supportive of those endeavors,” Norrell said. “We have a duty as scientists to help people … It’s important to keep that spirit, even in the face of massive adversity, like when funding is being challenged, because it’s the right thing to do.”

Lauren Cohen is the general assignment editor. Contact her at [email protected].