In this Friday’s issue of Science the GenderSci Lab has a peer-reviewed Policy Forum article,“Law, Policy, Biology, and Sex: Critical Issues for Researchers.” In this explainer, we provide additional background and context on this piece, and answer common questions.

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.

To help bring sex contextualist frameworks into the laboratory, we wrote this condensed, portable, 1-page document that answers common questions about sex contextualist approaches in experimental design, execution, and reporting.

Recently lab director Sarah Richardson published a paper proposing sex contextualism as a new model for conceptualizing and operationalizing sex in biomedical research. We take a moment to unpack sex contextualism with Sarah, digging into both the substance and the implications of her argument.

GSL made a teaching slidedeck that walks through the central ideas of Richardson’s paper “Sex Contextualism,” with the aim of equipping students with critical tools for understanding sex contextualism as a conceptual and practical framework and why it matters.

In her recent sociogenomics manifesto The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Paige Harden sets out to rescue behavior genetics from the spectres of racism and eugenics. Harden portrays eugenics much like a trait in a pedigree chart: passed on from eugenicist to eugenicist, predictably uniform, easily traceable, and unchanging over time. To promote her monolithic portrayal of eugenics, Harden’s narrative is simple and obfuscates the complexities that have allowed eugenics to survive - even flourish - within the field of genetics.

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.

Through 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.

A 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.

Our 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.

Below 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.

In 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.

The 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.

Here, 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.

We 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.

In 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.

With 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.

In 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.

This 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.

In 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.