AIM-Gender: Accelerating Innovation for Mothers

Project Details

There is a long history of the exclusion of women from clinical trials, and where women are included, they tend to be underrepresented compared to men. While sex-disaggregated analyses are increasingly common to explore potentially differential treatment impacts on women and men, gender-specific analyses about how health conditions, treatments, and concerns intersect with social determinants of health are limited.

This translates into both:

1. Failure to include women as research participants in sufficient numbers,
2. Failure to incorporate concerns about women’s health and maternal health into the research agenda.

In the AIM-Gender project, we aim to address this critical gender bias through collaborations with Concept Foundation – a NGO working on improving access to sexual and reproductive health medicines and technologies in low- and middle-income countries – and researchers at Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College (Belgaum, India) and Bayero University's Africa Centre of Excellence in Population, Health and Policy (Kano, Nigeria).

We are exploring the extent of gender bias related to the participation of pregnant women in clinical trials, at the intersection of the health system, health facility, health workers, and women.

Researchers

Associate Professor Meghan Bohren

Dr Mridula Shankar

Alya Hazfiarini

Collaborators

Concept Foundation

Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College (Belgaum, India)

Bayero University's Africa Centre of Excellence in Population, Health and Policy (Kano, Nigeria)

Funding

This project is supported by a grant from MSD Merck for Mothers