Highlights
- •Sex, a biological construct, and gender, a social construct are two distinct variables that may independently influence human health.
- •Despite calls for inclusion of sex and gender into health sciences research, gender is often ignored or conflated with sex.
- •In this commentary, we provide clarification of the distinction between these two variables and concrete examples of gender-related variables that can be collected under the four domains of gender identity, gender roles, gender relations, and institutionalized gender.
- •We also provide methods for incorporating these variables into statistical analysis.
- •We hope these guidelines will help researchers in their efforts to incorporate gender into their studies, thereby meeting requirements of funding agencies and ultimately improving health equity and precision medicine.
Abstract
Numerous studies have demonstrated that sex (a biological variable) and gender (a
psychosocial construct) impact health and have discussed the mechanisms that may explain
these relationships. Funding agencies have called for all health researchers to incorporate
sex and gender into their studies; however, the way forward has been unclear to many,
particularly due to the varied definition of gender. We argue that just as there is
no standardized definition of gender, there can be no standardized measurement thereof.
However, numerous measurable gender-related variables may influence individual or
population-level health through various pathways. The initial question should guide
the selection of specific gender-related variables based on their relevance to the
study, to prospectively incorporate gender into research. We outline various methods
to provide clarification on how to incorporate gender into the design of prospective
clinical and epidemiological studies as well as methods for statistical analysis.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: September 23, 2020
Accepted:
August 15,
2020
Footnotes
Declaration of interest: none.
Funding: The GOING-FWD Consortium is funded by the GENDER-NET Plus ERA-NET Initiative (project ref. number: GNP-78): The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (GNP-161904), La Caixa Foundation (LCF/PR/DE18/52010001), The Swedish Research Council (2018-00932), and The Austrian Science Fund (FWF, I 4209). V.R. is funded by the Scientific Independence of Young Researcher Program of the Italian Ministry of University, Education and Research (RBSI14HNVT).
This manuscript was conceptualized by C.P.T., V.R., L.P., and C.M.N. The initial draft was written by C.P.T., with all other authors contributing to editing.
Conflict of interests: We declare no competing interests.
Identification
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