 | Pictured at the Women of Vision Award Dinner are (from left) Yale trustee Margaret H. Marshall '76 J.D., chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts; honorees Gloria Steinem and Roslyn Milstein Meyer '71 B.A., '73 M.S., '77 Ph.D; and Carol Mazure, director of Women's Health Research at the School of Medicine. |
Feminist author and activist Gloria Steinem, honored recently as a "Woman of Vision" by Women's Health Research at the School of Medicine, applauded Yale for conducting studies on women's health issues.
"The idea of gender-specific healthcare existed before, except it was the other gender," she said at the Women of Vision Award Dinner at the Omni Hotel. She said she remembered a time when women were so excluded from health care research that "even the mice that were experimented on were male."
Also honored was Roslyn Milstein Meyer '71 B.A., '73 M.S., '77 Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in private practice in New Haven, a founding member of the Council for Women's Health Research, and a co-founder of both the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven and Leadership, Education and Athletics in Partnership, an educational mentoring program.
Vice President and University Secretary Linda Lorimer said she was "astonished" to learn in 1998 at the founding of Women's Health Research that women and women's health issues had been largely overlooked in the federal funding of medical research.
"We women have been paying taxes which, in turn, support the National Institutes of Health's funding of major research projects, but apparently the systematic study of our health had not been near the top of the agenda," Lorimer said.
Women's Health Research at Yale is the nation's largest interdisciplinary research program devoted to women's health research. Its mission is to generate new and useful scientific knowledge about women's health, determine sex-specific differences in health and disease, and disseminate information derived through research to the scientific and health care communities, particularly the general public.
Topics examined through the program have included those unique to women (such as ovarian cancer), as well as conditions that are more common in women than in men (such as breast cancer) or are becoming more common for women (such as smoking).
Carolyn Mazure, director of Women's Health Research, psychiatry professor and associate dean of faculty affairs at the School of Medicine, said Women's Health Research at Yale was founded with a $6.5 million grant from The Donaghue Foundation to meet a need for research-based health information on women.
"We decided that it was time -- it was past time -- to include women in research study participation more universally, to insure that pre-clinical science studied animals of both sexes, that vital laboratory investigations did not ignore the sex of the organism from which tissues or cells would be studied, and that gender differences in health and health outcomes become a focus of our work in order to enhance the lives of all members of the community," she said.
Mazure noted that among many of the pressing issues are osteoporosis, breast cancer, lung cancer in women, HIV/AIDS and heart disease.
"A major new study finds that aspirin helps healthy women avoid strokes but does not reduce their risk of heart attacks unless they are over age 65 -- the opposite effect of how aspirin affects men," she said.
In introducing Steinem and Meyer, Mazure said, "These are individuals who see the possibilities for positive change, create opportunities to take action and enhance the trajectory of how lives are lived."
A co-founder and former editor of Ms. Magazine, Steinem helped start such activist groups as the Women's Action Alliance and the National Women's Political Caucus. She is also president of Voters for Choice, an independent bipartisan political action committee that supports candidates working for reproductive freedom.
Steinem was critical of the Bush administration, particularly its goal to declare the fetus a person under the law, which she said would strip women of the right to their bodies. "We need to establish reproductive freedom as a fundamental human right, like freedom of speech," she said.
Meyer said raising funds for research into women's health issues is still a challenge, but one that must be met. "It is still not a done process," she said. "It still needs people's engagement and interest and money."
Women's Health Research at Yale has provided funding for over 40 research projects conducted by investigators from over 42 departments and groups at Yale. These investigators also have engaged colleagues in scientific collaborations at over 40 institutions in the United States and internationally.
-- By Jacqueline Weaver
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