Representation of Women in Cardiovascular Clinical Trial Leadership

Who designs and leads cardiovascular trials shapes which questions get asked and how women’s disease is studied. This brief research letter quantified how few women hold those roles.

Across 200 cardiovascular trials, only about 11 percent of leadership committee members were women; the median female representation per committee was 10 percent, and more than half of trials had no female physicians in leadership at all. The underrepresentation was stark and systematic.

The relevance to patients is indirect but real. The documented under-recognition and under-treatment of women’s cardiovascular disease is plausibly reinforced by their absence from the leadership that sets research priorities and interprets results. Diversifying that leadership is one structural lever for closing the care gap.

We rate the evidence moderate for its descriptive purpose. As a cross-sectional snapshot it reliably documents a disparity without analyzing its causes or consequences; its clinical significance is contextual — important for the field’s structure rather than for an individual patient’s care.