Thank you for visiting nature. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. The goal of sex and gender analysis is to promote rigorous, reproducible and responsible science. Incorporating sex and gender analysis into experimental design has enabled advancements across many disciplines, such as improved treatment of heart disease and insights into the societal impact of algorithmic bias. Here we discuss the potential for sex and gender analysis to foster scientific discovery, improve experimental efficiency and enable social equality. We provide a roadmap for sex and gender analysis across scientific disciplines and call on researchers, funding agencies, peer-reviewed journals and universities to coordinate efforts to implement robust methods of sex and gender analysis.
Sex and gender in health research
When hooking up is working out
S ex is the most talked-about, joked about, thought-about issue in our culture. We are not short of information on sexual practices — thank you, Fifty Shades of Grey — but there is a general absence of accurate detail of what happens to our bodies during, and as a result of, the act. Yet sex is good for our mental and physical health. It lowers the heart rate and blood pressure. It may boost the immune system to protect us against infections and it certainly lowers stress. The consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist Dr Leila Frodsham thinks we should be better educated about it. More information could make us healthier, happier and save the NHS lot of money, she believes. She would like to see more investment in sexual health as preventive medicine.
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Metrics details. Much work has been done to promote sex and gender-based analyses in health research and to think critically about the influence of sex and gender on health behaviours and outcomes. However, despite this increased attention on sex and gender, there remain obstacles to effectively applying and measuring these concepts in health research. Some health researchers continue to ignore the concepts of sex and gender or incorrectly conflate their meanings. We report on a primer that was developed by the authors to help researchers understand and use the concepts of sex and gender in their work. We provide detailed definitions of sex and gender, discuss a sex and gender-based analysis SGBA , and suggest three approaches for incorporating sex and gender in health research at various stages of the research process. We discuss our knowledge translation process and share some of the challenges we faced in disseminating our primer with key stakeholders. In conclusion, we stress the need for continued attention to sex and gender in health research.
No publisher will ever go broke overestimating the appetite for books about the battle between the sexes. In the past few years, science popularizers have told us why men and women can't talk to each other, how evolution programs our behavior and why we are, in the end, from different planets. Crenshaw, '64, adds a new voice to the scientific babel, arguing that gender differences arise from a "sex soup" of hormones, raging and otherwise. Crenshaw, an MD, researcher and sex therapist, has written a fascinating, accessible book on the biochemical differences that separate the sexes. She sprinkles her prose with titillating vignettes and pulls together bits of research that suggest tantalizing theories of a deeper understanding of sexual development.
