When researchers want to understand how the human body responds to training, fatigue, and recovery, they're mostly studying men. A sweeping review of over 600 recent papers from top exercise physiology journals found that nearly half included only male participants, while fewer than one in ten focused exclusively on women. The imbalance doesn't stop at the lab: women make up just 27 percent of authors in these fields and 16 percent of senior authors.
This matters because when male physiology becomes the default, female biology gets treated as the exception. "When findings based primarily on males are generalized to females, important sex-based differences in physiology, diagnosis, and treatment can be overlooked," explains Dr. Meaghan MacNutt, who led the research at the University of British Columbia. That oversight has real consequences—from how we diagnose disease to how athletes train to how injuries get rehabilitated.
The Gaps Run Deeper Than Numbers
The research team, published in Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, found that the problem extends beyond who gets studied. Most papers fell short of international guidelines for sex and gender equity in research. More than half used imprecise or inaccurate language when discussing sex and gender, making it harder to compare results across studies or apply findings reliably to different groups.
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Start Your News DetoxWhat's striking is that this bias appears across the field regardless of who's doing the research. Women authors were just as likely as men to exclude female participants or treat male physiology as standard. "Women researchers aren't perfect," MacNutt says. "We all have work to do."
But there's a pattern worth noting: women researchers in the field do tend to include more female participants in their work, collaborate more often with other women, and communicate more clearly about sex and gender differences. The gap isn't about individual intention—it's structural. Exercise physiology has far fewer women than other biomedical fields, with numbers closer to physics or computer science.
MacNutt's hope is that naming the problem creates pressure to fix it. Some researchers are already moving the needle, but change requires more than individual effort. "Shifts in researcher behaviour are essential, but they aren't likely to happen without support and action at all levels," she notes—pointing to academic institutions, funding agencies, and scientific journals as places where real change starts.
The field is beginning to reckon with what it's missed by treating half the population as an afterthought. The next step is whether that reckoning actually shifts how research gets designed.
