PRESS RELEASE
Contact: Henry Herrera
Telephone: +1-301-801-0608
Email: info@endtodv.org
WHO Is Falsifying the Truth about Women in Medical Research
WASHINGTON / March 13, 2026 – Feminists often achieve their goals by bending and subverting the truth. Sometimes their falsehoods are misrepresentations. Other times, the claims are outright untruths. A recent social media post by the World Health Organization falls in the latter category.
On March 8, the WHO issued a Twitter post featuring Dr. Gaya Gamhewage, a senior manager at the World Health Organization (1). She made this disturbing claim:
“Did you know? For decades, medical research and treatment plans have focused mainly on men, leaving women out of the picture.”
But Gamhewage’s claim is flatly untrue.
Since 1995, the U.S. National Institutes of Health has tracked the number of male and female participants in NIH-funded research. A recent study by James Nuzzo reveals that year after year, the number of females has exceeded the number of males. “Averaged over the 28-year period, females made up 58% of participants in NIH-funded research trials,” Nuzzo concludes (2).
This conclusion is affirmed by analyses of subsets of research studies:
- A 1979 review of NIH-supported clinical trials revealed that 268 trials included both men and women, 12 studies were male-only, and 13 were only for women. (3)
- A review of the MedLine database for the years 1966-1990 identified 753 studies involving men and 854 studies involving women (4).
- A 2001 General Accounting Office report revealed, “GAO found that women were a majority of the clinical trial participants in the new drug applications (NDA) it examined.” (5)
Additional analyses reveal that funding for women’s health has never lagged, compared to men. Overall, 14% of the NIH research budget has been allocated to women’s health, while only 6% has gone for men’s health (6).
Despite this overwhelming evidence, activists like Gamhewage continue to make the claim that women were routinely excluded from or underrepresented in medical research, a wild statement that undermines the credibility of the entire WHO organization.
The fact is, it’s men, not women who have been shortchanged by the research enterprise. Dr. Gamhewage needs to retract her false assertion and set the record straight.
The Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance – DAVIA — unites 230 member organizations from 42 countries in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. https://endtodv.org/davia/
Links:
- https://x.com/WHO/status/2030539043293798680
- Women Are Not “Understudied” or “Underrepresented” in Medical Research
- Dickersin K, Min YI. NIH clinical trials and publication bias. Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials. 1993
- Bartlett EE. Did medical research routinely exclude women? An examination of the evidence. Epidemiology. 2001.
- https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-01-754
- https://jameslnuzzo.substack.com/p/nih-funding-of-mens-and-womens-health
