No sex please, we're researchers
Plus Yesteryear and Invisible Women in a presidential library!
Well hello there GFPs! I guess you thought you might have seen me again sooner than this but, well, edits be editing. Perhaps I will simply be editing forever now. Perhaps this is hell nor am I out of it (cheeky easter egg for my fellow english lit grads there 😘). But enough whining from me - at least about doing my job anyway. Let’s find something more interesting to whine about — like how researchers are still not doing sex analysis!
That’s right, friends, seven years after I solved all sexism by publishing Invisible Women, and a decade after the US National Institute of Health (the world’s largest single public funder of biomedical research in the world) told researchers to start thinking about sex (not like that) in the design, analysis and reporting of their studies, it turns out that sexism remains unsolved and researchers continue to pretend sex doesn’t exist (again, not like that, at least I don’t think so).
A new study that looked at a sample of 574 NIH-funded papers published between 2017 and 2024, “found that although a majority — 61% — included both sexes as subjects, only 44% of them reported their results by sex.” Although I would quibble slightly with the phrasing of that sentence, because while 61% is of course technically a majority, it’s still not great, is it? Especially since, as the paper notes, “Of the single-sex studies, 34% focus on sex-specific topics” which means that a majority of THOSE papers (and a bigger majority than 61%) should have included both females and males — and guess which sex they tended to think wasn’t worth including, bet you can’t!
Thirteen per cent of publications don’t even bother to specify the sex of their subjects — and even when they do, that doesn’t mean they are very informative about it. As the paper’s lead author, Nicole Woitowich, put it, “They don’t actually say we used 10 female mice and 10 male mice; they’ll say we used mice of both sexes.” Helpful.
But to return to the matter at hand: the fact that while an inadequate number of studies funded by a body that requires them to include both sexes (unless they have a good reason, like studying a single sex issue) do in fact include both sexes, even fewer of them do any sex analysis even though this too is at the very least strongly encouraged by the institution funding them. Which, in fact, is not a new finding — several studies have uncovered a similar scenario of researchers dragging their feet when it comes to sex analysis, even when they have gone to the trouble of including the deeply complicated and troublesome sex known as female.
A large 2020 study of 720 papers published in 34 journals across nine biological disciplines, found that since a similar analysis was carried out in 2009, there was “a significant increase” across all nine disciplines in the number of studies that included both sexes — but in eight of the disciplines (that’s also a majority fyi, although again a substantially larger one than 61%) there was NO CHANGE in the proportion of studies that did any sex analysis — and basically no one bothered to explain why. As for the studies that didn’t include the troublesome sex, the majority of them either didn’t bother to explain why either — or if they did they “relied on misconceptions surrounding the hormonal variability of females.”
Also in common with other papers on this topic, the new analysis of NIH-funded papers also found that the sex of the researchers matters too. In Invisible Women I referenced an analysis of 1.5 million papers published between 2008–15, which “found that the likelihood of a study involving gender and sex analysis ‘increases with the proportion of women among its authors’,” with the effect being “particularly pronounced” if the lead author is a woman. (IW, p.317). Similarly this new study found that “when women were the first or senior author, the research was more likely to include both sexes and analyze the results by sex” and that the effect, particularly when it came to sex analysis, was especially high “when both the first and last author of the paper were women: While only 39% of papers with a male lead author analyzed data by sex, 58% of papers with a woman-woman dyad did.”
The trouble is, of course, that if the current US administration has its way, this is the future for US research. A paper published in March found that during the first year of the Trump administration, female researchers were disproportionately affected by NIH grant terminations — possibly because women are more likely to do unhinged things like studying the female half of the global population, which we now understand to be part of the woke mind virus and therefore very bad. And indeed, a Washington Post analysis found that over the same period there was also a 31% drop in the number of projects funded in 2025 that included the word “women.”
Still, at least US research is no longer being “degraded” by DEI efforts, eh?
Things I liked this month
Milanote — this is an organisation app for creative projects that was absolutely invaluable to me as I first got going with my new book, when I was still collating research. I haven’t used it recently as I’ve been in the writing rather than the collecting period, and so I hadn’t noticed that my subscription was coming up for renewal, and I was pretty annoyed that I’d just been charged for another year — but when I messaged them to ask if they could let me off they replied promptly and refunded me straightaway. So if you’re looking for a good organiser for your next project, definitely check them out. This is NOT an ad, I genuinely found it to be a very helpful tool, and I was really impressed by how they responded when I was charged for a year that I wasn’t going to use. Most companies would have told me to get lost.
THIS TWEET! When was the last time I said that I wonder…I rarely go on twitter these days for obvious reasons, but occasionally someone sends me a funny tweet and when there my muscle memory invariably takes me to my notifications — and I’m so glad that happened this week because LOOK!
That’s it for the free portion of this edition of the Invisible Women newsletter, GFPs. Join me below the fold for a few thoughts about tradwives and Yesteryear, along with some brief Botox-watch themed comments on The Boroughs, otherwise see you next time! xoxoxo
Half victim half accomplice, like everyone else
As part of the research for my new book, I recently read a paper called Tradwife: Between Myths and Realities. Published in October last year, this study drew on “primary survey data of 1000 women aged 18–34, alongside analysis of large-scale secondary datasets on gender attitudes and labour market trends,” and it found that most young women are not actually particularly drawn to the “submit to your husbands” part of the tradwife narrative so much as the “modern work culture sucks” aspect of it — something, in fact that they share with young men of their age. This was, as you can imagine, a relief for this ageing feminist to read, since while modern work culture does indeed suck, that doesn’t mean freedom is to be found in a mop — or, indeed, in a man. Generations of women fought for our right to vote, to learn and to work at least in part because without the right to self-determination the woman’s lot is extremely precarious — a little detail that tradwife influencers tend not to dwell on all that much.