The International AIDS Society (IAS) congratulates the scientific journal The Lancet for its decision to encourage researchers to enrol more women into clinical trials and to plan to analyse data by sex as a matter of routine, not only when known to be scientifically appropriate.

The step taken by the Lancet follows scientific evidence showing that men and women experience disease and respond to treatment in different ways. A study published recently by the same journal showed that women who smoke have a higher risk of coronary heart disease and lung cancer than male smokers. Also, in many diseases women have more side-effects from treatment than men, due to differences in body surface areas, body mass and amount of adipose tissue. Similar studies show how being female or male can be an important factor of health, illness and response to treatment than what we know now, and The Lancet’s decision to encourage a gender-oriented policy for clinical trials will hopefully help to provide more data on this aspect.

The IAS is extremely pleased to see that an editorial gender policy initially adopted by the Journal of the International AIDS Society (JIAS) http://www.jiasociety.org/content/14/1/11 has now been embraced by other publications and JIAS is proud to have taken a leading position on such an important issue. The introduction of this policy from the JIAS followed a Consensus Statement of the Industry Liaison Forum (ILF) that specifically recommended “that research data should be disaggregated by sex to ensure opportunities for gender based analysis using a variety of indicators, such as retention in ART programmes, morbidity and mortality, loss to follow-up, and pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic parameters”.

The Lancet decision follows the first European Gender Summit (Brussels, November 8-9 2011) in which a group of organizations including the Lancet and JIAS discussed the issue of gender in research and scientific publication.

Evidence presented at the summit showed that fewer women than men reach high-level jobs in medicine and science despite women being the majority of students at university, and that without quotas or targets, it will take a long time to reach equality. The IAS hopes that gender policy initiatives will soon be promoted for a better gender balance in publications, editorial teams and among authors and reviewers.