Are Gender Differences Enough?
These days I’ve been thinking about my work here at WHRY and how it fits into my past studies as a former Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies major (I’m now majoring in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology). In seminars, we explored how gender is a social construct and how sex, too, may be more than a binary. We learned about how the intersections of race, class, and gender shape shared societal experiences and systematic inequalities.
It made me think about the work that’s going on at WHRY — and why it’s so necessary.
Perhaps you aren’t aware, but scientific research can be a conservative field, accustomed to slow and deliberate steps in the work and also in response to even necessary change. Dhiksha pointed this out in a previous post, but it was only 24 years ago that The National Institutes of Health required the inclusion of women in clinical studies and an analysis by sex or gender.
Culturally, we are at a moment where many people are realizing and celebrating diverse expressions of gender and all of the accompanying intersections with race and ethnicity. However, in the science field, we are still fighting for research based on something other than men and male animal models. We are far from fully integrating consistent analyses of intersectional differences of sex and gender, race, and class into the norm of research.
Some might question the insistence on researching sex and gender differences. Aren’t women supposed to be the same as men? But past research has shown that differences exist, whether they are due to biological sex or socialization in gender. And we simply must place equal importance on researching women’s health as we have done with men.
This may seem like a dismal prospect, that science is lagging behind the cultural moment. But science is progressing, slowly but surely. With helpful and persistent pushes by institutions like WHRY which aim to keep pushing the boundaries of what has been researched, there is hope for the future.
Women and their male allies fought for gender equality in the social and political sphere for more than a century, and there’s still so much to do. We began the push for gender equality in the scientific field in just the past two decades, and if we keep up the effort, we can look forward to growing more equal in our opportunities to live in a healthier and happier future.
