Sex Cells: The Fight To Overcome Bias and Discrimination in Women’s Healthcare

Award-winning researcher Greenberger, the SVP of science and health policy for HealthyWomen, focuses in this book (cowritten with Kalia Doner) on women and how many medical and scientific professionals are failing them. She stresses that a person’s biological sex affects both their health and quality of health care. For example, heart and autoimmune diseases, migraines, and other conditions present differently in many people with XX chromosomes, and medical devices such as pacemakers, joint replacements, and stents work differently for them. But she says that many patients don’t receive the appropriate attention or care because of the sex bias that exists in clinics, laboratories, and clinical studies. Greenberger backs her argument up with chronological research that spans from 1999 to 2023. One research study about women’s health, for example, found that only male animals were used in many lab tests, and only 10 percent of the National Institutes of Health budget is devoted to women’s health.