New and out from the GenderSci Lab this week in the journal Social Science and Medicine is a comprehensive paper characterizing extensive heterogeneity in COVID-19 sex disparities over time and across states in the U.S. The paper is the first longitudinal study to quantify variation in COVID-19 gender/sex disparities across U.S. states.
Read MoreThrough what methods would we know whether COVID-19 deadlier for men than for women? In a new commentary just out in Women’s Health Issues, the GenderSci Lab examines the limitations of case fatality rate (CFR) as a metric for studying sex disparities in COVID-19 outcomes.
Read MoreA thorough history of scientific ideas about the long reach of the womb in which you are gestated, Richardson’s book breaks new ground, challenging the reader to rethink much of what they have so often been told about the relationship between a pregnant person and their fetus.
Read MoreOur new study evaluated the prevalence and performance of private equity-owned fertility clinics in the United States. This study is the first to quantify the extent to which private equity is acquiring swaths of the fertility industry.
Read MoreBelow we explore how the authors of the 2020 Nature paper helped frame this small COVID-19 sex difference study as an unsubstatiated “Battle of the Sexes” in the popular press.
Read MoreIn our Matters Arising piece, we aren’t just arguing that there are some small issues with the original paper. We argue that its core claim is completely unsubstantiated: that the Takahashi et al. study does not, in fact, demonstrate that biological sex explains differences in COVID-19 patient outcomes.
Read MoreThe GenderSci Lab has decided to update our report card parameters, so that we now track states’ reporting of gender/sex interactions for three outcome variables (age, race/ethnicity, and comorbidities), plus nonbinary gender. Here we unveil our first report card in this new iteration, from April 2021.
Read MoreHere, we will summarise our general reflections from our 8 months of tracking data collection and reporting through the current iteration of our Report Card. First, we'll describe the challenges of data collection, then we will explore changes we observed in the reporting of socially relevant variables by each state.
Read MoreWe recap the process of creating our COVID-19 State Report Card, which tracks the comprehensiveness of state reporting of socially relevant variables for COVID-19 cases and fatalities. Here we also provide the grades and results from our February 2021 report card.
Read MoreIn a collaboration with the Harvard SOGIE Health Equity Research Collaborative, today the Harvard GenderSci Lab has a new post up on the Health Affairs blog about gaps in COVID-19 public health data collection on trans, non-binary, and gender-expansive people.
Read MoreWith media headlines such as “Urgent Action Needed on Disturbing Male Fertility,” the findings of Levine et al. (2017) received wide press coverage, including in alt-right online forums. And yes, we went to the dark web so you don’t have to. Here we document and analyze discourse on alt-right threads on 4CHAN, Reddit, and Twitter following the publication of the 2017 Levine et al. study that the GenderSci Lab critiques in our new paper.
Read MoreIn this Q & A, we ask Professor Stern more about the specific ways in which the alt-right animates fears of white male decline, revives biologically essentialist ideas about gender, and insinuates the authority of legitimate scholarship, in particular through appeals to science. We also invite her reflections on how interdisciplinary feminist science studies scholars can responsibly engage with the alt-right’s deeply problematic claims.
Read MoreThis post will dive deeply into what can be gleaned from these early studies comparing sperm quality across geographical regions within Europe for contextualizing current high-profile claims about the decline of sperm around the world . . . . “West” and “Other” are not tenable categories, and an analysis of their boundaries from multiple angles sees their geographic and demographic architectures crumble.
Read MoreIn this blog post, I’m going to walk through how sperm statistics are made by analyzing the 2017 paper by Levine et al., wherein the authors argue that sperm counts around the globe are dropping–but most particularly in “Western” countries and not “Other” countries. I highlight some key methodological choices that Levine et al. and others made while trying to gain insight into the state of global sperm counts.
Read MoreCounting is usually assumed to be a pretty simple activity; it is, after all, one of the very first things that we learn at school . . . . In this blog post, I examine the ways in which sperm count is less straightforward than it might appear, and consider what this means for scientific research on global sperm count decline.
Read MoreWe wanted to understand whether sperm counts were truly declining and whether evidence supported the authors' claims of imminent danger to fertility, health, and the environment. That analysis led us to be skeptical of claims of dramatic global sperm decline leading to an imminent crisis in male fertility and health. We think the patterns hinted at in Levine et al.’s meta-analysis rather offer compelling evidence that sperm count can vary both pathologically and non-pathologically under different conditions and environments.
Read MoreThis piece takes a more in-depth look at the current reporting of individuals who identify as non-binary or who are unclassified by sex. The take-home, summarized in Tables 1 and 2 below, is that there are few states explictly collecting data on trans and nonbinary people, and that the ways in which states report “unknown” gender/sex lack transparency and are highly discordant across states.
Read MoreOur findings are stark. Black men are far more likely to die than any other group; but Black women have over 3 times higher mortality rates than white or Asian/Pacific Islander men (Figure 1). Further, the sex disparity within race varies widely.
Read MoreThe GenderSci Lab is looking for two undergraduate research assistants to assist with the lab’s current project analyzing sex & gender disparities in COVID-19 outcomes.
Read MoreHighlights from December’s Report Card
From September to December, the average state score increased from 6.65 (D grade) to 6.78 (D grade) on a scale of 0-10.
Both Montana and New Mexico saw score increases of 3. This takes Montana’s score to a B grade, and New Mexico’s score to a D grade.
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