No sex please, we're researchers

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.