Project Overview

In general, women take part in research less than men. We found women take part in our research less than men too. We are a team of rehabilitation researchers located across Canada that test new treatments like drugs, technologies, and remote therapies on people who have had a stroke that could help improve their lives. So, it would be important for us to have a balanced number of men and women take part in our research. There may be a few reasons why women might not take part in our research. These include their individual traits and social situation, logistics of taking part, how we recruit them, and what the research involves. With this project, we hope to explore these items further and find out why women do not join our research more with the end goal of trying to change that going forward.

We plan to explore this in a few ways:

1. Compare the general stroke population to people who take part in our research to see if they may be different.
2. Interview people who do and do not take part in our research to see if they may be different.
3. Survey our team to see if we have any opinions or practices that might get in the way of us recruiting more women into our research.
4. Train our team on everything we learn from the above.

By going through the steps above, we can better understand anything getting in the way of more women taking part in our research. We can then use this knowledge to make changes to our future research. This will help ensure that equal numbers of men and women take part in our research so that both men and women can benefit equally from our findings for years to come.

Principal Investigator

Mark Bayley , Toronto Rehabilitation Institute

Team Members

Janice Eng, University of British Columbia

Sandra Black, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre

Sean Dukelow, University of Calgary

Bradley MacIntosh, Sunnybrook Research Institute

Marilyn MacKay-Lyons, Dalhousie University

Michelle Ploughman, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Ada Tang, McMaster University

Robert Teasell, Parkwood Institute

Ruth Barclay, University of Manitoba

Farrell Leibovitch, Canadian Partnership for Stroke Recovery

Shannon MacDonald, University Health Network – Toronto Rehab

Susan Marzolini, University Health Network – Toronto Rehab

Jason McCarthy, Eastern Health Authority

Courtney Pollock, University of British Columbia

Sepideh Pooyania, Riverview Health Centre

Brodie Sakakibara, University of British Columbia

Amra Saric, Nova Scotia Rehabilitation Centre

Jennifer Yao, GF Strong

Amy Yu, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre

Partners and Donors

Women's Brain Health Initiative