“Unfortunately, scientific results do not determine their own political interpretations, nor do the investigators.”

Does human sexuality have a genetic component? In an era of genomics that allows parents to select for traits such as the skin color or eye color of their baby, and of continued discrimination, imprisonment, and even death penalities for LGBTQ+ people globally, questions around the genetic determinacy of sexuality require close ethical consideration.

“The HIV/AIDS epidemic, along with the milieu of social, legal, and political factors that have shaped the entwined experiences of LGBT oppression and liberation over the 20th and 21st centuries, has generated challenges to estimating uniform conditions for self-reporting same-sex sexual behavior across space and time.”

In a recent Science Letter, “Genome Studies Must Account for History”, and in this short blog series, the GenderSci Lab investigates the social and historical context of the biobank data used for a recent genetic study of same-sex sexuality, and explores the political and ethical implications of these projects.

The Harvard GenderSci is hiring an undergraduate research assistant for an exciting new project evaluating the rise of private equity in obstetrics/gynecology/fertility within the United States.

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.

The GenderSci Lab at Harvard is seeking a law student research assistant (RA) to be part of an exciting multidisciplinary research team. Preference is given to Harvard Law students.

Meet GenderSci Lab Director Sarah Richardson and learn more about the Lab’s origin story in science writer Bennett McIntosh’s in-depth profile in this month’s Harvard Magazine.

Interview with GenderSci Lab Assistant Director Heather Shattuck-Heidorn, Newly-Appointed Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at University of Southern Maine

Interview with GenderSci Lab Assistant Director Meredith Reiches, winner of the 2019 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship

Interview with GenderSci Lab member Maayan Sudai, Assistant Professor of Law and of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Haifa

The public health perils of overstating sex differences

Where is gender in the biosocial moment?

Comic by Brianna Weir : Signs vs. Science

Two recent papers challenge the idea that men evolved to prefer slim women with small waists because they are healthier and more fertile.

Brain sex-difference research usually focuses on average differences between men and women. Neuroscientist Daphna Joel challenges this approach by asking, “Wait! What exactly do you mean by ‘difference’?”

The memo's authors appeal to science, but referring to biological traits such as genitals and genes does not make their definition of sex scientific. This selective definition of sex deviates from scientific consensus about the nature of human sex and gender. 

The SWHR task force operationalizes ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ as research variables with sweeping explanatory potential in biomedicine. The manner in which they do so reveals a theoretical gulf between a widely practiced genre of bioscience knowledge production in women’s health research and critical feminist approaches to science, medicine, and the body.