Londa Schiebinger

• Stanford University

Intersectionality describes interdependent systems of inequality related to sex, gender, race, age, class and other socio-political dimensions. By focusing on the compounded effects of social categories, intersectional analysis can enhance the accuracy and experimental efficiency of science. Here we extend intersectional approaches that were predom...

JBJS convened a symposium to discuss the reporting of sex and gender in research studies as an imperative to improve research methods and results to benefit all patients. Barriers to improved reporting include a lack of societal and cultural acceptance of its need; a lack of education regarding appropriate terminology and appropriate statistical me...

Sex and gender are distinct terms that must be used correctly. Data regarding sex and gender may be collected using a 2-step method that separates biological sex and self-reported gender identity. The PhenX Toolkit, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is one tool that provides investigators with recommended standard data-collection p...

Funding agencies have ample room to improve their policies.

Excellent research integrates sex, gender, and/or intersectional analysis—from the very beginning and throughout the research process. This article highlights techniques for analyzing sex, how sex and sex interact, how sex and gender interact, and the need for intersectional analysis. Designing sex, gender, and intersectional analysis into research...

Background In recent years, interest has grown in whether and to what extent demographic diversity sparks discovery and innovation in research. At the same time, topic modeling has been employed to discover differences in what women and men write about. This study engages these two strands of scholarship to explore associations between changing res...

Sex- and gender-specific medicine considers both sex, which refers to biological characteristics related to hormones and genetics, and gender, which refers to sociocultural attitudes, behaviors, and identities. Gender is multidimensional and may include women, men, and non-binary people. Sex and gender interact to influence health outcomes. Thus, s...

Background In this paper, we argue for Gender as a Sociocultural Variable (GASV) as a complement to Sex as a Biological Variable (SABV). Sex (biology) and gender (sociocultural behaviors and attitudes) interact to influence health and disease processes across the lifespan—which is currently playing out in the COVID-19 pandemic. This study develops...

To improve the outcomes of research and medicine, government-based international research funding agencies have implemented various types of policies and mechanisms with respect to sex as a biological variable and gender as a sociocultural factor. After the 1990s, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Canadian Institute for Health Researc...

Word embeddings use vectors to represent words such that the geometry between vectors captures semantic relationship between the words. In this paper, we develop a framework to demonstrate how the temporal dynamics of the embedding can be leveraged to quantify changes in stereotypes and attitudes toward women and ethnic minorities in the 20th and 2...

The Challenge Research into sex determination formerly focused primarily on testis development, while active processes controlling ovarian development were largely ignored (Veitia, 2010). In fact, ovarian development had long been considered a "default" or "passive" developmental outcome of the bipotential gonad. Method: Rethinking Concepts and The...

‘Gendered Innovations’ is defined as the process that integrates sex and gender analysis into all phases of basic and applied research to assure excellence and quality in outcomes. Gendered Innovations enhance excellence in science, medicine, and engineering both in terms of knowledge and personnel; they lead to gender-responsible science and techn...

Your Editorial “Promoting women in science and medicine” (Nov 20, p 1712)1 is timely. The genSET science leaders panel2 analysed gender and sex bias in basic research and found that medical treatments for women are less evidence-based than for men. Pain research demonstrates this point well: 79% of animal studies published in the journal Pain over...

Academic couples constitute 36% of the US professoriate. Universities are in the midst of a major transition in hiring practices to support these and other faculty with working partners. However, less is known about academic couples among medical school faculty and surgical specialties specifically. This study was designed to address this gap. In 2...

Considerable sex and gender bias has been recognized within the field of medicine. Investigators have used sex and gender analysis to reevaluate studies and outcomes and generate new perspectives and new questions regarding differential diagnoses and treatments of men and women. Sex and gender analysis acts as an experimental control to provide cri...

This series of three articles reviews gendered innovations in knowledge production over the past three decades with a focus on current approaches. The introduction lays out important analytical issues. The article by Ineke Klinge and Sarah Newman reviews and analyzes gendered innovations in biomedical and health research. The article by Londa Schie...

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The prominent scholars featured in Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering explore how gender analysis can profoundly enhance human knowledge in the areas of science, medicine, and engineering. Where possible, they provide concrete examples of how taking gender into account has yielded new research results and sparked creativity, opening ne...

What don't we know, and why don't we know it? What keeps ignorance alive, or allows it to be used as a political instrument? Agnotology—the study of ignorance—provides a new theoretical perspective to broaden traditional questions about "how we know" to ask: Why don't we know what we don't know? The essays assembled in Agnotology show that igno...

Statistics in Brief publications present descriptive data in tabular formats to provide useful information to a broad audience, including members of the general public. They address topical issues and questions. They do not investigate more complex hypotheses, account for interrelationships among variables, or support causal inferences. We encourag...

In the early modern world, botany was big science and big business, critical to Europe's national and trade ambitions. Tracing the dynamic relationships among plants, peoples, states, and economies over the course of three centuries, this collection of essays offers a lively challenge to a historiography that has emphasized the rise of modern botan...

Women have traditionally been underrepresented in clinical trials. In order to translate recent advances in our understanding of the molecular and physiological bases of sex differences into new therapeutics and health practices, sound sex-specific clinical data are imperative. Since the founding of the Office of Research on Women's Health within t...

Michael Stolberg claims there was a broad movement in the sixteenth century toward sexing skeletons and offers Felix Platter's singular 1583 female skeleton and Caspar Bauhin's 1597 reproduction of that skeleton as evidence. He admits that these illustrations did not become a standard feature of anatomical textbooks, though he maintains (erroneousl...

What useful changes has feminism brought to science? Feminists have enjoyed success in their efforts to open many fields to women as participants. But the effects of feminism have not been restricted to altering employment and professional opportunities for women. The essays in this volume explore how feminist theory has had a direct impact on rese...

The voyages of scientific discovery conjure in our minds images of Sir Hans Sloane bioprospecting in Jamaica in 1687 or Joseph Banks voyaging aboard the Endeavour to Tahiti and New Zealand in 1768. But women also set foot on rickety and unsure ocean-going vessels in the 18th century in the service of science. The German-born Maria Sibylla Merian vo...

A woman who… engages in debates about the intricacies of mechanics, like the Marquise du Châtelet, might just as well have a beard; for that expresses in a more recognizable form the profundity for which she strives. Immanuel Kant, 1764 Kant’s sentiments reiterated those of the great Carl Linnaeus, who taught in his lectures given at the University...

The global expansion from Europe was accompanied by a voracious acquisition of knowledge and natural objects from exotic places. Contrary to these trends, where naturalists assiduously collected plants for medicines and potential profit, there were few systematic attempts to transfer into Europe knowledge concerning medicinal herbs for birth contro...

Do women do science differently? This is a history of women in science and a frank assessment of the role of gender in shaping scientific knowledge. Science is both a profession and a body of knowledge, and Londa Schiebinger looks at how women have fared and performed in both instances. Shoe first considers the lives of women scientists, past and p...

I am grateful to Florence P. Haseltine for reviewing my book Has feminism changed science? (Harvard University Press, 1999) ( Science 's Compass, 23 July, p. [538][1]). Her review, however, presents the central question of the book as, What contributions have women made in science that a man could

Feminism is a complex social phenomenon that has suffered misadventures and traveled down a number of blind alleys. Liberal feminism called for womens rights equal education pay and opportunity that provided them to make it in a mans world. However this has also led into certain blind alleys such as the tendency to: ignore or altogether deny sex an...

Traducción de: The Mind Has No Sex? Estudio que aborda el papel activo de la mujer en el desarrollo de las ciencias naturales y médicas en la Europa de los siglos XVII y XVIII y el enfrentamiento al que estuvieron expuestas debido a la visión cultural de la época en relación a la diferenciación sexual.