False diagnosis: When it comes to gender, doctors don't play favorites.

• Author: Young, Cathy

Among the feminist causes of the 1990s, few had a broader or more powerful appeal than women's health. Who could fail to be outraged by the charge that a male-dominated, gender-biased medical establishment had endangered women by giving the lion's share of attention to men? But maybe the outrage should have been directed at the accusers, not the accused. Today, a little over a decade after this crusade moved into the spotlight, the feminist indictment of medical sexism has been largely discredited--but not before infecting the discussion of health care with rancorous gender politics and provoking equally misguided claims of victimhood from some men.

Not long ago, groups such as the National Women's Health Network (which declared in a 1994 fundraising letter that "Medical research has mainly been done on men, for the benefit of men only") found an eager audience among journalists and politicians. Former Rep. Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.) noted that mostly male researchers "are more worried about prostate cancer than breast cancer"; Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala lamented that health care had been addressed from "the white male point of view." Bill Clinton vowed that women would never again be "second-class citizens" in medical research and care.

The evidence that women had been "shortchanged" seemed powerful. Major studies of coronary heart disease had been limited to men. The most notorious example was a study published in 1989 concluding that aspirin helps prevent heart attacks; it had used a sample of 22,000 male physicians and not one woman. More outrage was fueled by reports that the National Institutes of Health spent just 14 percent of its budget on women's health and failed to ensure women's adequate inclusion in clinical trials.

Under pressure from the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues, an Office for Research on Women's Health was established at the NIH in 1990. Three years later, to the dismay of many medical professionals who warned against letting politicians dictate research priorities, Congress passed legislation requiring all federally funded clinical studies to include enough women and minorities to analyze the findings by sex and race. One could argue that heavy reliance on government funds inevitably invites such intervention, but that doesn't excuse the pols who wield the blunt instruments, especially when their intervention is based on myth.

In fact, as Yale Medical School lecturer Sally Satel...