Taken Out of Context: A Warning to Scientists
Harvard Gazette | Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite
“In an era when classifications of sex and gender have been thrust to the forefront of legal and policy discussions, gender researchers have a message for scientists: Be careful with your words,” documents Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite.
“[In the journal] Science, a group of scholars from Harvard’s GenderSci Lab created a roadmap to help researchers take greater care when writing or using biological definitions and classifications of sex in their work, mindful of the ways their language may be used in the public arena… The researchers…called on scientists to acknowledge the wider uses of their definitions of sex and associated research findings, often in very different contexts than their original research.”
A director of Harvard’s GenderSci Lab and the senior corresponding author of the paper summarized, “Scientists should act ethically in anticipating how their work enters the world” and recommended “careful contextualization.”
According to Aggarwal-Schifellite’s piece, “The researchers recommended scientists think carefully about use of ‘sex’ as a category of analysis at all. That category may not be necessary when studying the relationship between, for example, a health condition and a range of variables like hormone levels, weight, or anatomy… In many areas, the premise that sex deeply pervades most aspects of human biology and cleaves humans into two essential types is being deeply challenged within scientific research.”
