Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Monday fired back at the author of an article saying her understanding of the drug industry was "inadequate," suggesting the piece was sexist.

"This is what being a woman in politics looks like: Disagreements aren't labeled as differing opinions. They're labeled as one's knowledge being 'inadequate.' As a reminder, I'm not the one who testified about Big Pharma under oath to Congress. It was an expert witness," she tweeted Monday evening.

The tweet comes in response to a piece by Derek Lowe in Science Translational Medicine that was published Friday. The article centers around an exchange Ocasio-Cortez had with Aaron Kesselheim, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard University, regarding the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) role in drug discovery.

In that exchange, Ocasio-Cortez highlights that the NIH, which is publicly funded, sometimes develops drugs that are then handed off to a for-profit industry.

"So the public is acting as an early investor, putting tons of money in the development of drugs that then become privatized, and then they receive no return on the investment that they have made," she said.

Lowe pushed back on her assertions.

"Rep. Ocasio-Cortez: it is absolutely your job to participate in hearings like the above, to question those appearing at them, and to look into such issues. But it's also your job to know as much about these issues as you can," Lowe wrote.

"Right now, your knowledge of where drugs come from appears to be seriously inadequate. To be fair, you're definitely not alone in that, but there's no reason not to learn more. Unless you, like many of your colleagues on both sides of the aisle, are mostly interested in generating zippy sound bites and looking dynamic for the next round of fund-raising and the next election. In which case, carry on. But that would be sad."