GSL Pens Comment on AMA’s Draft Guidance on Reporting Gender & Sex
By Hannah Niederriter, Marina DiMarco, & Madeleine Pape
Today, members of the GenderSci Lab, led by Marina DiMarco and Madeleine Pape, submitted a letter of comment to American Medical Association's (AMA) Manual of Style committee regarding their “Draft Guidance on Reporting Gender, Sex, Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation, and Age in Medical and Scientific Publication.”
The final document will provide guidance to clinicians and biomedical researchers on inclusive language for use in reporting sex, gender, and sexuality categories.
The AMA’s efforts are important because they can support researchers in navigating the complex landscape of sex and gender terminology, improving precision, and minimizing harm.
To support these efforts, our letter makes the following recommendations to the AMA committee:
The Guidance should clearly distinguish between sex-related variables and sex as a set of assigned categories;
The Guidance should more strongly emphasize the importance of describing and visualizing distributions of sex-related outcome variables in order to accurately characterize overlap between groups and intra-category variation;
The key terms offered in the Guidance should be expanded to include structural sexism and gender/sex;
The Guidance should avoid reducing intersectionality to individual identity and should instead emphasize a structural intersectionality approach.
“The Guidance should remind researchers to critically interrogate whether sex categories themselves are appropriately interpreted as explanatory, or rather should be understood as serving as proxies for other, perhaps unidentified, causal variables”
We thank the AMA Manual of Style committee for opening its draft guidance to public review and comment, and commend the committee’s guidance for its significant advancement in the medical reporting of sex- and gender-related variation.
You can view the full text of our submitted letter below and download it as a PDF here.
Suggested citation
Niederriter, H., DiMarco, M., and Pape, M. “GSL Pens Comment on AMA’s Draft Guidance on Reporting Gender & Sex” GenderSci Lab Blog. 30 Sept 2024. https://www.genderscilab.org/blog/gsl-pens-comment-on-amas-draft-guidance-on-reporting-gender-and-sex
Statement of Intellectual Labor
Marina DiMarco wrote the initial draft of the comment based on a lab meeting discussion. Madeleine Pape revised the comment based on lab meeting discussion. Hannah Niederriter wrote the blog post, and provided edits and references to the comment. Final revisions and edits were made by Sarah Richardson and Atlas Sanogo.