What We Do
The GenderSci Lab is a platform for innovation, collaboration, and the elevation of new and diverse voices and methodologies in the study of gender/sex in biology. The lab brings together gender scholars and biomedical scientists to build and validate new theory and methods for the intersectional study of gender/sex in human populations. Specifically, the GenderSci Lab works to forge concepts and methods to counter bias and hype in sex difference research, elevate the importance of context, contingency, and variation in the study of gender and sex in biology, identify novel methods of operationalizing gender as a variable in intersectional biomedical research, and engage the implications of biological claims about gender and sexual diversity for law and public policy relevant to the lives of gender and sexual minorities.
How We Got Started
Founded in 2018 by Professor Sarah Richardson, the GenderSci Lab developed out of a gender and science reading group created at Harvard in 2010. The reading group became a generative space for interdisciplinary scholarship at the nexus of gender studies and the biological sciences, and a leading voice arguing for the importance of analyzing gender as a variable in biomedical research. In 2015, the group published a high-impact commentary in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the National Institutes of Health’s new policy requiring the study of sex in preclinical materials. In 2017-2018, the group led a year-long Mahindra Humanities Center workshop, "Sex/Gender: Theory into Practice", which engaged feminist theorists, science studies scholars, and practicing scientists in conversation about the constructs of “sex” and “gender” in biological and health science research, highlighting the work of researchers who devise innovative ways to analyze gender in intersectional biomedical research. In 2018, the lab founded the GenderSci Blog, which features timely commentary on research related to the science of sex/gender differences from scholars across the disciplines.
