A quick analysis of medical literature shows a fairly similar picture: More than two-thirds of all studies and trials listed on Medline in the 1970s and '80s included both men and women, while more than half of the single-sex studies were female-only. There were more all-female than all-male studies of chemotherapy, diabetes and kidney disease. Nearly 90 percent of studies of stroke and most trials of treatment for hypertension included women. Women were also well-represented in cancer research; in the early 1970s, they outnumbered men by 2,000 in a major national study on body iron levels and cancer risk published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

One area in which women's "exclusion" has drawn especially harsh criticism is heart disease research. A particularly infamous study in the 1980s investigated the benefits of aspirin for heart attack prevention in an all-male sample of 22,000 doctors. Yet many experts, including Dr. Lynn Rosenberg, a Boston University epidemiologist who has done a number of studies on women's health, believe that it made scientific sense to do such a trial and then decide if a similar study was needed for women. When studying heart attack prevention, you get faster and better results from a group in which a fairly high rate of heart attacks can be expected. Before 65, men suffer heart attacks three times as often as women (and even between 65 and 74, the ratio is 2-to-1). A reliable study that included women would have required a longer time and a much larger sample.

In addition, why shouldn't serious heart disease in middle age, when men are primarily the ones affected, be a legitimately higher priority than heart disease among the elderly? (Just as the fact that breast cancer generally strikes at a younger age than prostate cancer justifies some of the disparity in resources). Thus, the claim that women have been "left out" of heart disease research is a gross exaggeration.

The pioneering study of cardiovascular health, the Framingham Heart Study, followed a sample that began with 2,336 men and 2,873 women in 1948. The Nurses' Health Study, launched in 1976 with 100,000 women, yielded important findings on how women's hearts are affected by smoking, oral contraceptives, hormone therapy and aspirin. The nurses' aspirin study, conducted around the same time as the infamous all-male doctors' study, was less rigorous -- the nurses recorded their own aspirin intake while the doctors were randomly assigned to a treatment or placebo group -- but hardly negligible.

An analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1992 found that women made up only 20 percent of subjects in clinical trials of treatments for heart disease. Again, this number is not as low as it may seem, given the sex ratio among patients under 65. (Older people of either sex are rarely included in drug trials because of their frailty and coexisting illnesses.) Nor was a "male model" mindlessly applied to women: Sex differences in the outcomes of surgery and drug therapy for heart patients were already being studied in the 1970s.