Abbasi says that the under-representation of women and ethnic minorities in clinical research is “nothing short of a scandal.”1 An underappreciated mechanism reducing women’s enrolment in research is the routine exclusion of older people from clinical trial participation.2 Because women significantly outnumber men in the population as age rises, forbidding research participation of people over a certain age—60, 65, 70, 75, and so on—often has the knock-on effect of excluding more women than men.The US National Institutes of Health recently adopted a policy of refusing to fund research with arbitrary age based enrolment restrictions. Among the benefits of this policy should be greater enrolment of women in research. All research funders should consider adopting a similar policy.
33
