The danger of women’s greater vulnerability to adverse drug events (ADEs) looms large in public consciousness, popular media, and scientific research. Yet, as a series of GenderSci Lab studies over the past four years have shown, biological explanations for this sex disparity rest on flawed empirical evidence, fraught regulatory processes, and media hype. We are excited to tie a bow on this research program with a new video explainer and a commentary in Women's Health Issues published last month that summarize our findings.

In a new paper in the American Journal of Human Biology by Mia Miyagi, Sarah Richardson, and Emilia Huerta-Sánchez from the Center for Computational Molecular Biology at Brown, we explore the effect of variation within a sex on these inference methods and use simulations to demonstrate that this variability can affect common variables used to quantify the sex ratio of migration events. Our results highlight that modeling individuals of the ‘same’ sex as interchangeable can have quantitative consequences and represent an application of sex contextualist principles to an open area of research in human biology.

As the 2026 Winter Olympics kick off with projected record-setting representation of women athletes, the GenderSci Lab is excited to share a video explainer of how gendered social factors contribute to a higher risk of injury for women athletes. 

Using animations and short interviews with GenderSci Lab researchers, the video unpacks our recent research paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine demonstrating how factors related to the history of underinvestment in women's sport such as smaller team sizes and lower ratios of practice to competition time may drive observations of higher rates of ACL injuries in women athletes. 

In a peer-reviewed paper recently published in Big Data and Society and led by Kelsey Ichikawa and Marion Boulicault, GenderSci Lab members explore the use of sex stratification in applications of machine learning in medical research and argue that current practices risk embedding biological sex essentialist assumptions into medical science. These practices include the creation of distinct algorithms for males and females (what we call “pink and blue algorithms”), the use of machine learning to identify distinct male and female patterns in disease, and the incorporation of gender/sex variables as predictors in algorithms for disease risk and detection. 

Over the course of nearly a decade, the GenderSci Lab (GSL) has developed incisive analyses, approaches, frameworks, and methods for thinking critically about sex and gender in biomedicine. Our new article “Three Maxims for Countering Sex Essentialism in Scientific Research” in the journal Biology of Sex Differences synthesizes lessons from GSL research into concrete and portable recommendations for biomedical researchers. Through the examples of gender/sex disparities in adverse drug events, COVID-19, and anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury, we offer guidance for avoiding the pitfalls of sex essentialism and producing better science. The article is designed for researchers, reviewers, and editors aiming to produce more rigorous science as well as for instructors and students at the undergraduate or graduate level interested in exploring common problems in sex essentialist research. 

In a new open access article recently published in the journal Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology, GenderSci Lab Director Sarah Richardson extends and develops her framework of “sex contextualism” (Richardson 2022). In this Q&A for the GenderSci Lab blog, Richardson digs into sex contextualism, the “riddle of variability,” and implications for research design, policy, and public understanding of sex difference science:

A new piece from the GenderSci Lab is forthcoming in Signs. Authored by Jamie Marsella, Marina DiMarco, Abigail Higgins, Sarah Richardson, and Joseph Bruch, this piece introduces the concept of “investment feminism” and the ways venture capital, femtech, and women’s health are intertwined.

This week, members of the GenderSci Lab published a new piece in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Authored by Annika Gompers, Ann Caroline Danielsen, and Sarah Richardson, this piece delves into how the gendered realities of women and men’s sports could affect how injury rates are captured.

We sat down to talk with Marion Boulicault, who recently became an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Marion is the Director of Interdisciplinary Research and Community at the GenderSci Lab.

What bold approaches can we take to rethink how we create and use health information?
Tune in on October 25 for RWJF’s Unscripted series to learn from Sarah Richardson and Keolu Fox about challenging the research status quo and moving closer to health equity. 

This September, members of the GenderSci Lab collectively drafted a letter to the subcommittee of the Journal of the American Medical Association tasked with developing and releasing guidelines for scientists related to reporting gender and sex.

The GenderSci Lab is seeking research assistants for Fall 2024! *Open to Harvard College students only*

This week, members of the GenderSci Lab published a new piece in the New England Journal of Medicine. Authored by the Lab’s historians of medicine and science, Ben Maldonado, Jamie Marsella, Abbie Higgins, and Sarah Richardson, this piece traces how authors in the Journal articulated harmful ideas of innate sex difference.

On April 10, the GenderSci Lab hosted an open house to celebrate our 5th year anniversary and our new space in the Harvard Science Center!

Come to this talk by postdoctoral fellow Dr. Alexandra Kralick about her research on orangutan skeletons.

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. 

We are recruiting for a 2-year postdoctoral associate for an NSF-funded project about operationalizations of sex in laboratory science! We especially welcome applications from philosophers of biology, life scientists or biomedical researchers with philosophy or science and technology studies (STS) training, and sociologists of science.

We are recruiting for a new lab manager! Spread the word and apply if you’re interested. Come join our team!

We sat down with Alex Borsa and Mia Miyagi, team leaders for an article out this week in GLQ entitled “The New Genetics of Sexuality,” which serves as a State of the Field review of sexual genetics research. Alex and Mia discuss what they learned while writing the piece and how they hope this work will be used moving forward.

This fall, we welcomed Alexandra Kralick to the GenderSci Lab as our new Robert Wood Johnson Foundation postdoctoral associate! We sat down with Alexandra for a Q&A to learn more about her plans and work in the lab!