Medical research on women is so biased that 61% of OB-GYN studies focus exclusively on having babies.
April 29, 2026
Original Paper
A Handmaid’s Tale: The Reproductive Bias in OB-GYN Science
SocArXiv · xg28s_v1
The Takeaway
A massive survey of over 300,000 medical abstracts shows that a woman's health is often defined solely by her ability to reproduce. Only about 23% of the research in the field of obstetrics and gynecology addresses health issues that are not related to pregnancy. This leaves huge gaps in our understanding of how diseases affect women throughout their entire lives. The data highlights how the reproductive lens has historically sidelined general women's health in favor of birth outcomes. Addressing this imbalance is essential for developing better care for conditions like endometriosis, menopause, and heart disease in women. It is a wake up call for the entire medical research community.
From the abstract
Feminist research has long argued that obstetrics and gynecological (OB-GYN) science and practice are biased toward reproduction. This bias means that women’s health is understudied in OB-GYN and is often not the primary focus of this medical specialty; instead, successful reproduction is prioritized, and women as patients are reduced to their reproductive roles. To quantify this bias, we applied a deep learning topic model (BERTopic) to 305,063 PubMed abstracts published in 83 journals under th