Gender and Sex in Cell Cultures and Animal Models

Sari van Anders

October 3, 2013

Though feminism is relevant across science disciplines, sometimes it’s easier to see how it might be relevant to the scientific questions of one area than another. For example, it might be less immediately obvious how sex comes into the bench biosciences vs. human research… though you’d have to have some serious post-feminist goggles on to think that human bioscience is in anyway normatively feminist.

This is a really useful and interesting article by a member of the Gap Junction Science community; an environmental immunologist and medical science educator Stacey Ritz.

[Picture of Stacey Ritz]

Here are the details below, and you can access the article here (Ritz et al – FASEBJ – in press). They do a great job of describing gender and sex, discussing how both may or may not be relevant to the sorts of research questions scientists are studying with cell cultures or animal models. Especially useful is, on page 6, a “Sex/Gender Toolbox for Experimental Scientists.” This might be perfect to spur discussion in a lab group discussion, a journal reading club, or something else.



[Image with the following text: The FASEB Journal. Life Sciences Forum. First steps for integrating sex and gender considerations into basic experimental biomedical research. Stacey A. Ritz, David M. Antle, Julie Cote, Kathy Deroy, Nya Fraleigh, Karen Messing, Lise Parent, Joey St-Pierre, Cathy Vaillancourt, and Donna Mergler]

[Image with the following text: In recent decades there has been an increasing recognition of the need to account for sex and gender in biology and medicine, in order to develop a more comprehensive understanding of biological phenomena and to address gaps in medical knowledge that have arisen due to a generally masculine bias in research. We have noted that as basic experimental biomedical researchers, we face unique challenges to the incorporation of sex and gender in our work, and that these have remained largely unarticulated, misunderstood, and unaddressed in the literature. Here, we describe some of the specific challenges to the incorporation of sex and gender considerations in research involving cell cultures and laboratory animals. In our view, the main‐streaming of sex and gender considerations in basic biomedical research depends on an approach that will allow scientists to address these issues in ways that do not undermine our ability to pursue our fundamental scientific interests. To that end, we suggest a number of strategies that allow basic experimental researchers to feasibly and meaningfully take sex and gender into account in their work.—Ritz, S.A., Antle, D. M., Côté, J., Deroy, K., Fraleigh, N., Messing, K., Parent, L., St‐Pierre, J., Vaillancourt, C., Mergler, D. First steps for integrating sex and gender considerations into basic experimental biomedical research. FASEB J. 28, 4–13 (2014). www.fasebj.org]