It is a pleasure to recognize another successful step in ensuring that women’s health is better understood and that the empirical foundation about women’s health continues to grow.

In the fall of 2024, the first-ever White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, led by Dr. Jill Biden and chaired by Dr. Carolyn Mazure, Founder and Director of Women’s Health Research at Yale School of Medicine, invited journal editors from the leading cardiovascular peer-reviewed journals plus other national science leaders to the White House. The purpose of this convening was to consider how to ensure that data on women is analyzed as it is in men and the results are reported in cardiology publications. 

To aid in the discussion, journal editors from orthopedic surgery discussed the challenges and subsequent success they encountered in changing manuscript submission criteria for the field of orthopedics.(1) With leadership from Dr. Mazure in collaboration with AMWA Past-President, Dr. Kim Templeton, Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at the University of Kansas Medical Center and Dr. Noel Bairey Merz, Professor and Director of the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center at Cedars-Sinai, the stage was set the stage for an interdisciplinary discussion regardomg specific considerations for changing submission guidelines in their journals.

Thanks to this model from orthopedic surgery and the dedicated collaborative work of journal editors in cardiology, 58 cardiology journals have now publicly endorsed the language of the SAGER Guidelines. These are the guidelines that focus on distinctly reporting and analyzing the data on women and men. The process is cited in the editorial (2) and illustrates how two different medical disciplines achieved meaningful change.  

This is significant as peer-reviewed medical journals are key in setting standards for research that is translated into clinical care and into what we teach our students. The goal for these meetings and resulting editorials, as well as hopefully others in the future, is to raise awareness among researchers and journal readers about the important roles that sex and gender play in health and the need to incorporate these factors into research at the time of study design and in the publication of results.

Sources:

  1. Leopold S, Hensinger RN, Schoenfeld AJ, Swiontkowski M, Rossi MJ, Templeton KJ for the Sex and Gender Research in Orthopaedic Journals Group: Improving How Orthopaedic Journals Report Research Outcomes Based on Sex and Gender. J Bone Joint Surgery 106(13):1145-1147, July 3, 2024.2
  2. Bairey Merz CN, Bonow RO, Carnethon M, Filippo Crea, Hill JA, Krumholz HM, Mehran R, Spatz ES. The Role of Cardiovascular Disease Journals in Reporting Sex and Gender in Research. JAMA Cardiology. Published online March 28, 2025. Available at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40156098/