Our piece in this Cell special issue considers how, in the context of policies mandating the consideration of sex (such as the NIH’s Sex as a Biological Variable policy), basic scientists can operationalize, analyze, and interpret sex-related variation in ways that achieve conceptual and statistical rigor, as well as precision in how such knowledge is applied in the clinic and beyond. 

Today, the GenderSci Lab has a new commentary out in Cell Reports Medicine, which argues that mandates to make male-female sex comparisons in all areas of biomedical research conflict with precision medicine’s goal of individualized and targeted treatments.

In 2016 the NIH issued a policy requiring consideration of sex as a biological variable (SABV) in all NIH-funded preclinical research on vertebrate animals and human cells and tissues…three years later, what have been the impacts of the policy on scientific research?

To answer this question, this year I conducted in-person, semi-structured interviews with nine basic science researchers from three different laboratories on the East Coast of the United States that use animal and tissue models to study metabolic disease. I transcribed the full interviews and then conducted thematic analysis of the data using the NVivo software to help organize my coding.