Mental Health & Menopause

By Lianne Suarez | 5 Min Read | August 14, 2025

Here’s a stark reality: Women make up 51% of the global population but only 38% of clinical trial participants. This isn’t just a number—it’s a barrier to equitable healthcare that affects millions of women every day.

The consequences are real and measurable. Women experience adverse drug reactions at nearly twice the rate of men, partly because medications are often tested primarily on male subjects and then prescribed to women with the assumption that biology doesn’t matter. It does.

The Enrollment Challenge

We have to enroll more women into clinical trials. This isn’t optional—it’s essential for scientific integrity and patient safety. Yet barriers persist:

Women of reproductive age are often excluded from early-phase trials due to pregnancy concerns, even when studies could be conducted safely. Recruitment strategies frequently fail to account for women’s caregiving responsibilities, work schedules, and healthcare access patterns. And historically, the medical research community simply didn’t prioritize understanding sex-based differences in treatment response.

The Cost of Inaction

If we don’t act now, we will never be able to address and correct gender disparities in health. Consider the ripple effects:

Cardiovascular disease kills more women than all cancers combined, yet women remain underrepresented in heart disease research. Autoimmune conditions disproportionately affect women, but treatment protocols are often based on mixed-gender studies that may not capture women’s unique disease presentations. Pain management, mental health interventions, and even basic pharmacokinetics—all areas where women’s experiences differ significantly from men’s.

Every day we delay means another generation of women receiving treatments that weren’t designed for their biology.

What Needs to Change

The solution starts with intentional action. At Indago, we’re committed to:

Proactive Recruitment: Partnering with sponsors and CROs to develop recruitment strategies specifically aimed at achieving gender parity in enrollment, not treating women’s participation as an afterthought.

Barrier Removal: Creating flexible trial protocols that accommodate women’s lives—from childcare considerations to transportation scheduling.

Regulatory Leadership: Working with sponsors to exceed minimum regulatory requirements for female enrollment, because doing the bare minimum isn’t enough.

The Imperative is Clear

This isn’t about checking a diversity box. It’s about scientific necessity. Make women’s health research a priority-because half the population deserves treatments based on evidence that includes them.

The time for equal representation in research is now. Who’s ready to make this the standard, not the exception?

What barriers have you observed in women’s clinical trial enrollment? How can we collectively improve representation in research? Share your thoughts below.