Sex and gender impact disease risk, manifestation, and outcomes in a variety of ways. However, females were excluded from clinical and pre-clinical studies for decades due to concerns over reproductive harm in humans and “complicated” hormone cycles in animals. This exclusion has resulted in a significant gap in our knowledge of health and disease in women and gender diverse individuals.
In addition to the research conducted by our members, the WHRC does it's own research to help us facilitate deeper integration of sex and gender-based anlysis. Click below and check back soon for more information on these projects.
Assessing SGBA Adoption in CIHR-Funded Research
Sex and gender impact disease risk, manifestation, and outcomes in a variety of ways. However, females were excluded from clinical and pre-clinical studies for decades due to concerns over reproductive harm in humans and “complicated” hormone cycles in animals. This exclusion has resulted in a significant gap in our knowledge of health and disease in women and gender diverse individuals.
To bridge this gap, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the primary funding body for health research in Canada, recommended and later mandated the adoption of Sex- and Gender-Based Analysis (SGBA) in research methodology. Thus, researchers applying for funding are now required to discuss how sex and/or gender play a role in their research and how they plan to analyze these variables. This project sought to examine whether CIHR’s changing policies around SGBA increased the mentioning of sex or gender, female-specific health, or 2S/LGBTQIA+ health in the abstracts of successful CIHR grant applications from 2009-2020.
We found that less than 3% of funded research abstracts mentioned sex or gender, less than 6% investigated female-specific outcomes, and just 0.35% focused on the 2S/LGBTQIA+ community. Funded proposal abstracts mentioning sex or 2S/LGBTQIA+ health increased slightly over time, whereas abstracts mentioning gender or female-specific health did not change. The percentages of overall funding allocated for sex, gender, female-specific health, and 2S/LGBTQIA+ health research largely mirrored these trends. Our results suggest that more work needs to be done to increase the adoption of SGBA in health research. Individual researchers, funding agencies, and publishers all play in integral role in closing the women’s health knowledge gap and advancing equity in health research.
Read our paper preprint on bioRxiv and a blog post (comming soon) summarizing our findings.
The SGBA research team includes Amanda Namchuk, Tallinn Splinter, and Tori Stranges.
