Why Women’s Health Deserves Better Sensors and Better Clinical Trials
From pharmacology lecture halls at McGill to MedTech innovation today: why treating female physiology as “noisy data” held back decades of diagnostics.
Back in undergraduate pharmacology seminars at McGill, one historical footnote stopped me cold: until the 1990s, women of reproductive age were routinely excluded from early-phase clinical trials—partly out of post-thalidomide caution, and partly because researchers worried estrogen and progesterone fluctuations would make datasets “messier” and harder to power statistically.
Variability Is Signal, Not Noise
We see the downstream echo of that mindset everywhere—from cardiovascular device sizing and drug metabolism dosing to endurance sports science, where foundational glycogen, thermoregulation, and recovery studies were overwhelmingly conducted on 18-to-25-year-old men.
What makes me genuinely optimistic working around medical devices and diagnostics today is watching a new generation of founders, engineers, and clinical trialists treat female physiology not as a niche “femtech” wrapper, but as core human biology—building continuous thermal sensors, non-invasive endometriosis diagnostics, pelvic health tools, and maternal monitoring hardware backed by rigorous clinical evidence.