Thank you so much.
As Acting President of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, or CIHR, I am pleased to appear before your committee to discuss women’s health research, alongside my esteemed colleague Dr. Angela Kaida, Scientific Director of CIHR’s Institute of Gender and Health, who will also be speaking today.
As Canada's health research funding agency, we at CIHR understand the power of research to improve the health and well-being of all Canadians, including women and girls. We know that sex and gender influence our risk of developing certain diseases, how well we respond to medical treatments and how often we seek out medical care, yet, as recently as 2010, fewer than 20% of basic scientists, 25% of health systems researchers and only a third of clinical and population health researchers in Canada accounted for sex in their studies. This meant that research results often stemmed from male-only studies and clinical trials, limiting our understanding of women's and gender-diverse people's health, which obviously impacted the quality of the care they received at that time.
It's in this context that, over the last decade, CIHR has taken action to promote the integration of sex and gender in research, including offering training modules for CIHR funding applicants and peer reviewers, and requiring researchers to integrate sex and gender into their research design when possible.
Thanks to leadership from CIHR, along with federal funding investments in sex and gender science, today, the integration of sex in health research proposals in Canada exceeds 90%, and gender is addressed in the majority of human research studies. Canada is now recognized as a world leader in sex and gender science, and a review that was published in the journal Science ranks CIHR as the number one agency in the world for the appropriate integration of sex, gender and intersectionality in funding policies.
In addition, CIHR is driving research in key priority areas of women's health.
I’ll now turn to my colleague Dr. Kaida, who will tell us more about these fascinating initiatives.
Go ahead, Dr. Kaida.