What role does curiosity play in shaping our collective body of knowledge?
We love the story of the lone genius following their curiosity: Einstein scribbling on napkins, the tech founder in a garage following an obsession, the writer hunched under a single lamp, chasing obsession into breakthrough.
This myth lives deep in our collective story of progress:
Curiosity > Discovery > Recognition > Impact
The reality is that this path is rarely so direct.
Curiosity might spark the question, but without funding, there’s no research. No publication. No recognition. No policy changes.
Whenever someone challenges something as being “not proven by science,” I like to remind them that science doesn’t prove what’s true; it proves what someone cared enough to fund for research.
If you want to understand the disparities in what is “proven” you must ask:
Whose curiosity gets funded?
Consider the human body.
The Disparity in Research
Hippocrates is often called the “Father of Medicine”; he was doing his thing around 460–370 BCE.
If we take that as our starting point, then we’ve been studying the human body for approximately 2,500 years.
For the vast majority of that time, the research has focused almost exclusively on men’s bodies.
It’s only in the last 30–50 years that we’ve seen sustains, systematic, and specific research into women’s physiology: hormone cycles, perimenopause, muscle growth, and other conditions unique to women.
This shift began in earnest in the 1970s, but the real turning point happened only in the 1990s.
For decades, women were excluded from clinical drug trials, on the belief that their hormone fluctuations would “complicate results.”
In 1986, the National Institute of Health finally recommended including women in clinical trials. And it wasn’t until 1993—just over 30 years ago—that the U.S. Congress mandated the inclusion of women in NIH-funded clinical research.
The Knowledge Gap
Meanwhile, entire conditions—like perimenopause and ADHD in women—went unstudied for decades.
Symptoms like mood swings, sleep disturbances, and irregular periods were generally attributed to stress, parenting, or “hectic schedules.”
Formal observation and study of women’s changes in mid-life didn’t start until 1990.
Similarly, issues like ADHD in girls and women were historically overlooked, because the symptoms in women often present differently from how they present in boys and men.
It’s not just these two conditions.
A long list of other diseases and issues have similar disparities, including:
- heart attacks
- strokes
- auto-immune diseases (which disproportionately affect women)
- depression and anxiety
- sleep disorders
- digestive disorders
- brain injury and concussion
- substance abuse
The Impact of the Knowledge Gap
The result of this disparity in knowledge is that women’s medical issues often remain undiagnosed or misdiagnosed.
And when women try to advocate for themselves, they are often outright dismissed or labeled as hypochondriacs, drama queens, or “hormonal.”
Doctors may have spent years in school, but they couldn’t have learned what hasn’t been studied.
And that’s the problem: the knowledge base itself is deficient.
The next time someone tries to persuade you of something based on what they “know,” remember:
When it comes to women’s health, we are still in the early days of knowing anything at all.
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