in alignment with femininity and gender role expectations, unable to maintain and care for family and housework, insubordinate, sick or in pain; then it were to mean they were mentally ill or disturbed, often diagnosed with hysteria. In 1948 some women volunteered to take part in an experiment designed to quantify pain in laboring women. During their labor, their hands were burned in order to try to measure their pain threshold with the option to quit at any time and to receive treatment. During childbirth and as it kept progressing, the females were unable to feel an increase in pain insomuch as many of them received second degree burns without realizing. In a 1979 observational study, 104 women and men gave responses to their health in 5 areas: "back pain, headaches, dizziness, chest pain, and fatigue". When receiving these complaints, it was seen that doctors gave extensive checkups to men more often than women with similar complaints, supporting that female patients tend to be taken less seriously than their male counterparts with regard to receiving medical illnesses. In 1990, the National Institutes of Health recognized the disparities in research of disease in men and women. At this time, the Office of Research on Women's Health was created, primarily to raise awareness of how sex affects disease and treatments. In 1991 and 1992, recognition that a "glass ceiling" existed showcased that it was preventing female clinicians from being promoted. In 1994, the FDA created an Office of Women's Health by congressional mandate. The Women's Health Equity Act, passed in 1993, gave women the chance to participate in medical studies and examine the gender differences. Before the act was introduced, there had been no research done on infertility, breast cancer, and ovarian cancer, which are conditions prevalent to women's health. Clinical trials and research The approach to women shifted from paternalistic protection to access in the early 1980s as AIDS activists like ACT UP and women's groups challenged ways that drugs were developed. The NIH responded with policy changes in 1986, but a Government Accountability Office report in 1990 found that women were still being excluded from clinical research. That report, the appointment of Bernadine Healy as the first woman to lead the NIH, and the realization that important clinical trials had excluded women led to the creation of the Women's Health Initiative at the NIH and to the federal legislation, the