Gender Toolbox: Recommandations for Health Researchers: Gender Campus

Gender Toolbox: Recommandations for Health Researchers

The inclusion of both men/males and women/females as study participants/subjects in health research is a prerequisite for good research practice (1). Such inclusion is crucial to understand humans’ variability, which is not possible when only male or only female subjects are studied (2). For analysis, the standard variable “female/male”, largely used in quantitative health research, is a first step towards inclusion, because it enables exploring variability between the two large categories of women and men. Its use is however often suboptimal for several reasons:

- It is a proxy of potentially different elements such as sex-related biological factors (hormone levels and function, chromosomes, gene expression, reproductive/sexual anatomy) and gendered sociological phenomena (socially constructed roles, behaviors, expressions and identities of girls, women, boys, men, and gender diverse people), and is thus not specific
- It contributes to the widespread confusion around the gender and sex concepts in health research, that tends to focus on sex-related biological explanations for observed differences in women's and men's health
- It excludes certain populations that do not fit into the female or male categories, such as intersex or gender diverse people

In order to support researchers conduct sex/gender analyses as required by some funding programs such as EU Horizon 2000, we developed this toolbox to guide the inclusion of sex/gender in terms of conceptualization and potential indicators to consider. Two sections therefore constitute this working document: a theoretical framework linking gender and health; and a list of indicators derived from it, to consider before conducting (gender/sex-related) health research. We begin by presenting some questions to address, to guide researchers in identifying relevant sex and gender hypotheses and identify measurement needs.