A fact that surprises most people the first time they hear it: until 1993, women weren't legally required to be included in clinical drug trials in the United States.
It goes back further than that. In 1977, the FDA issued a policy recommending that women of childbearing potential be excluded from early-phase drug trials entirely, a reaction to the thalidomide tragedy of the prior decade. The policy was applied broadly enough that it effectively excluded most premenopausal women from medical research for nearly two decades. It wasn't until 1993 that Congress passed a law requiring the inclusion of women in NIH-sponsored clinical trials, and 1994 before the FDA established its Office of Women's Health.
The effect of that gap is still measurable today. A Harvard Medical School analysis found that women make up roughly 60% of the patient population in the U.S. but only about 42% of clinical trial participants. That's not ancient history, that's current research still catching up to a decades-long head start problem.
Supplement research inherits this same gap, often worse, since supplements face far less regulatory scrutiny than pharmaceuticals to begin with. A huge amount of the foundational research behind common wellness ingredients, dosing, mechanism studies, was built on male physiology, then generalized to everyone. Female hormonal cycles, the additional complexity of interactions with estrogen and progesterone, pregnancy and postpartum physiology, perimenopause and menopause, these aren't edge cases. They're normal, common physiological states that most research simply wasn't designed to account for.
This is the actual reason Bestie exists in the form it does. Not as a slogan, as a formulation standard. Every ingredient decision, from why stevia never makes the cut to why certain doses get adjusted for cycle-stage sensitivity to why some botanicals get ruled out entirely for reproductive-stage formulas, comes from actually accounting for the research gap instead of pretending it doesn't exist.
Women's health research funding and attention have started to catch up in recent years, and that's genuinely good news. But "started to catch up" still means most of the supplement industry is building on old assumptions. We'd rather build on the fuller picture, even when that means more work, tighter formulation constraints, and fewer shortcuts.