From the Los Angeles Times:

Researchers avoid ‘messy’ hormonal female mice. And that hurts women
By DEBORAH NETBURN
MAY 30, 2019 | 11:05 AM

Is sexism getting in the way of good science?

An essay published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science argues that the stereotypes that have plagued women since at least the 1800s — that they are emotional creatures who are more prone to hormone-fueled mood swings than men — have also affected decades of neuroscience research involving mice and other animals.

Until recently, most neuroscience labs have conducted their experiments on males only, said essay author Rebecca Shansky, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University in Boston. Scientists justified this exclusion by claiming that fluctuating hormone levels in females had the potential to make test results “messy.” …

“The more I heard people talk about it, the more riled up I got,” she said.

What especially got under her skin was the underlying assumption that a rigorous study of the female mouse brain required all kinds of manipulations to compensate for female hormones — and that this was not the case with males.