Women's History Month
Institute Happenings
Upcoming Events
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Dear Friends,
Happy women’s history month! Many thanks to those of you who joined us for our February Women’s Health Forum with Dr. Jonathan Silverberg.
We all share the goal of improving women’s health through research, medicine, and education. We are excited to reflect on this with you by highlighting major gains in the history of women’s health research and practice.
Best,
Megan Runge and Alexa Karczmar
WHRI Staff
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March is Women’s History Month! This month we want to highlight women across the basic, medical, and social sciences. While women continue to make gains in these fields, we continue to push for greater access for, and diversity among, women in the research and medicine. You can read more about women and diversity in STEM fields
here
.
Below are a few influential women who shattered a major glass ceiling for young women and women of color in science. We hope that focusing this month’s newsletter and blog posts on just a few of the women who have made countless contributions to STEM and social science fields, in the past and present, will inspire you as much as these women have inspired us.
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Notable Women Scientists of the 1890s-1980s:
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Marie Curie
was a Polish physicist and chemist who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person and only woman to win twice.
Chien Shiung Wu
was born in China and traveled to the U.S. to study physics at the University of California Berkeley. She specialized in nuclear fission receiving a doctoral degree in 1940. She became a U.S. citizen in 1954.
Rosalind Franklin
was a British chemist known for her influential role in the discovery of the structure of DNA.
Alice Ball
was an African American chemist, famed for her development of an injectable oil that was an effective treatment of leprosy during the 1940’s.
Mamie Phipps Clark
along with her husband were the first African-Americans to obtain their doctoral degrees in psychology from Columbia University in New York City. Her work developed into the famous doll experiments that assessed children’s attitudes towards race.
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Don’t forget to follow this month’s
blog posts
as we highlight and celebrate different women in science who have contributed to bettering our understanding of medicine, science and culture!
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History of the Women's Health Movement
In the 1960s, the Neighborhood Health Centers (NHCs) of the civil rights movement would appear. These NHCs brought a community health model to underserved populations that feminists would later broaden with the birth of feminist health centers.
In 1971, the first Feminist Women’s Health Center opened in Los Angeles, followed shortly by the Aradia Clinic in Seattle, WA. These clinics provided services to low-income women of all backgrounds, and supported community health education, providing workshops and lectures.
In the late 1980s, a formal investigation of the National Institutes of Health’s women’s health research was conducted by the General Accounting Office. The investigation found that only 13.5% of NIH money went to women’s health research, and women continued to be excluded from clinical trials.
In 1990, the Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) was established by the first female director of the National Institutes of Health, Bernadine Healy, MD.
In 2007, the Women’s Health Research Institute was founded at Northwestern with the motto ‘science to care’ and dedicated to women’s health research and women doing research.
In 2013 the Institute of Medicine issued its famous report ‘Shorter Lives, Poorer Health’ which outlined the worsening state of women’s health in the U.S.
In 2014, Kibbe and Woodruff found that male animals dominated fundamental research and that the percent of female-based research had decreased to a three decades low of just 13%.
That same year, Stephen Colbert famously uttered the line – “If you want bells and whistles like the bumpy bits in front and all that fancy plumbing down there, it comes at a price ladies, like we don't make medicine for you."
On January 25, 2016, NIH released a
policy
requiring
sex
to be included as a variable in all grant submissions. In 2018, we celebrated the two-year anniversary of that policy by declaring January 25th Women’s Health Research Day.
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Megan Runge and Alexa Karczmar, WHRI Staff, celebrate Women's Health Research Day an the anniversary of the sex inclusion policy.
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Women’s health research continues to expand, and vital sex-inclusive science and healthcare will continue to develop, improving the lives of all of us! But we have to be patient and continue to work toward a more inclusive future. Providing hope is a quote from one of our famous scientist, Marie Curie, “I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy’. History has a way of being prismatic as well as repetitive. At the WHRI, we are dedicated to inclusion of people and ideas that ensures that all of us are equal participants in a future of better health.
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References:
- National Research Council, & Committee on Population. (2013). US health in international perspective: Shorter lives, poorer health. National Academies Press.
- Nelson, J. (2015). More than medicine: a history of the feminist women's health movement. NYU Press.
- Nichols, F. H. (2000). History of the Women’s Health Movement in the 20th Century. Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic & Neonatal Nursing, 29(1), 56-64.
- Yoon, D. Y., Mansukhani, N. A., Stubbs, V. C., Helenowski, I. B., Woodruff, T. K., & Kibbe, M. R. (2014). Sex bias exists in basic science and translational surgical research. Surgery, 156(3), 508-516.
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Save the Date for Monthly Forums in 2018
For the past decade, the WHRI has hosted monthly Women’s Health Forums which highlight basic science, clinical, or sociological research with a focus on the role of sex and gender in health and disease. The forums are open to all members of the Northwestern community, as well as the general public, and attract a diverse and interprofessional audience. Below you will find the schedule for the first half of 2018:
March 13th - Kirstie Danielson, PhD, University of Illinois at Chicago
April 17th – Sharon Rosenberg, MD, Northwestern University
May 22nd – Seema Kahn, MD, Northwestern University
June 19th – Dima Elissa, VisMED-3D
July 17th – Marla Mendelson, MD, Northwestern University
All forums take place from 12:00-1:00 PM in Prentice Women's Hospital. As usual, a light lunch will be provided with registration. Please keep in mind there is no forum in January due to the 2nd Annual Symposium on Sex Inclusion in Biomedical Research.
Do you have suggestions for a forum topic? We'd love to hear from you!
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Upcoming Events
Tuesday, March 13th: Monthly Women's Health Research Forum
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Examining Type 1 Diabetes through a New Lens: The Interaction of Sex & Gender in a Chronic Disease
Kirstie Danielson, PhD
Assistant Professor
Division of Transplant Surgery, College of Medicine
Division of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, School of Public Health
University of Illinois at Chicago
12:00PM to 1:00PM
Prentice Women's Hospital
250 E. Superior Street
3rd Floor Conference Room L South
This forum will not have continuing nursing education activity. The planners and faculty have declared no conflict of interest.
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