We came from academic centers all over the country and assembled for the first time on September 4, 1991, at the Hunt Valley Conference Center in Maryland. It was a historic event convened by the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Research on Women's Health (ORWH), which had been established one year earlier in 1990.
Researchers devoted to studying the health of women were invited to set a research agenda to address the dramatic gaps in scientific information on the health of women. This included conducting research on conditions unique to, more prevalent among, or more serious in women, or for which different interventions for women and men were needed.
Dr. Bernadine Healy, the first and only woman to be appointed as a director of the NIH, spoke to us. She called our experience together an “awakening.”
Increasing calls for research attention on the health of women during the 1980s within the Department of Health and Human Services, of which the NIH is a part, were spurred by a 1990 government report showing that NIH-funded research was not including women as study participants.
The ORWH was now charged with ensuring that women were appropriately represented and studied in research supported by the NIH, which as the greatest single funder of biomedical research in the U.S. had great influence over the direction of scientific inquiry.
Although some of us at the Hunt Valley Conference had been working within professional societies to establish the importance of studying women, most of us were largely on our own at our home institutions. We were elated to find colleagues who shared our scientific interests and personal commitment in recognizing the health needs of women. We were exhilarated by what we thought would be the impending change that would soon occur in science conducted across the nation.
It was not too long before we realized that what we were expecting would take time and lots more effort. In fact, it would be three years before the NIH began requiring that their funded research must include women. Four years until guidelines for inclusion were official, and 10 years until investigations designed to study women were reflected in the scientific literature.
From 1990 until 1998, I was privileged to work with the ORWH, professional groups, and great colleagues in advancing the message that the health of women had to be studied.
And, for me, the sea change for which I had hoped came in 1998 with support from Yale Medical School, a grant from The Patrick and Catherine Weldon Donaghue Foundation, and the inception of Women’s Health Research at Yale. The work of building a research center that could also form relationships with the community, educate the next generation, and have a national voice in improving health then began, and continues to be a joy. Looking forward, I see even more opportunity to advance this work and the initiatives of our center.
Sincerely,
Carolyn M. Mazure, PhD
Norma Weinberg Spungen and Joan Lebson Bildner Professor in Women's Health Research
Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology
Director, Women's Health Research at Yale