ABSTRACT
Heart disease, cancer, and human immunodeficiency virus infection are major causes of mortality for both men and women throughout the world. 1 Yet as Gerdie Weidner in Chapter 4 and Debra Murphy and Jeffrey Kelly in Chapter 11 in this volume point out, most studies have focused on men and have under-emphasized the extent of these problems in women. That males have higher age-adjusted death rates than females for all major causes of death including heart disease (1.89 males die for every 1 female), cancer (1.47 males die for every 1 female), and human immunodeficiency virus infection (9.09 males die for every 1 female) may partially explain this neglect (Adams & Hardy, 1989). However, the major causes of morbidity and mortality that primarily affect women, such as osteoporosis and breast cancer, have been given disproportionately little scientific attention relative to their toll. Compelling questions related to the etiology, treatment, and prevention of these serious diseases remain, yet the rate of scientific advances in these research literatures is low. One reason for the lack of attention given to women's health problems and the underrepresentation of females found in almost all health research may be that males have been treated as the standard for health. Although there is no prototypic person, research has suggested that for some clinicians the healthy male may be synonymous with the healthy adult (Broverman, Broverman, Clarkson, Rosenkrantz, & Vogel, 1970). Not only clinicians but researchers, too, have tended to treat males as representative of people, generalizing findings based solely on males to all people, excluding women as subjects of study, and exaggerating the importance of trivial differences observed between male and female subjects (e.g., Grady, 1981; Levy & Richey, 1988).
