The Data Bias Breaking Women’s Health and Modern Care
DEFAULT MALE:
The Data Bias Breaking Women’s Health and Modern Care
Coming Soon, Fall 2026
For more than a century, medicine has treated one body as the standard for all: the male body. Its data, its research models, its technologies, and even its definitions of “normal” have been built around this quiet assumption. The result is not merely outdated - it is dangerous. And women bear the cost in delayed diagnoses, ineffective treatments, and care systems that routinely misunderstand them.​
In Default Male, women’s health expert and data strategist Sheena D. Franklin traces how this bias, long embedded in medical research, now extends into digital health, wearable technologies, and the fast-growing world of AI-driven care. Drawing on emerging science and frontline examples, she reveals how gender-blind datasets continue to shape the tools that claim to personalize and modernize medicine and healthcare, often with consequences that go unseen.
From cardiology guidelines to biometric sensors, from virtual care to aging, Franklin shows how innovations meant to advance health are still built on data that leaves women out, and why closing the women’s health data gap is one of the most urgent challenges of modern healthcare.
Yet Default Male is not only a diagnosis of the problem. It is a guide to what comes next: the policies, standards, design principles, and advocacy campaigns capable of rebuilding the foundations of care for a world where women are no longer treated as the exception.
Clear-eyed, rigorously researched, and quietly revolutionary, Default Male reframes women’s health for the age of AI. This is not a story about “women’s issues.” It is a story about the future of medicine and healthcare, and who it is built to serve.
