Q&A: Is it time for scientists to rethink how they study sex in research?
Our understanding of sex has come a long way. Aristotle theorized that heat during conception determined whether someone was born male or female. But while researchers have long moved on from that idea, scientists in a new issue of Cell published this week argue that our ideas about sex — and how to best measure it in research — remain crude and outdated.
STAT spoke with Madeleine Pape, a sociologist of gender at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and lead author of a perspective about the need to more clearly define sex in research. She and her co-authors argue that “sex” isn’t the most accurate or useful variable in research; it’s a category made up of other characteristics. And it’s these more measurable related factors — such as the presence of a uterus, hormone levels, and genetics — that researchers should track. Exactly which factors they track should be based on the context of a given study.
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