So these international “equity” scholars spent five years researching the definition of “gender” and came back with nothing.
That’s not stopping them from pushing “gender” into all aspects of research:
International scholars concluded a five-year “equity” project by determining the concept of “gender” cannot be defined but should be incorporated into all aspects of scientific research nonetheless.Funded by the European Union, their research was part of a project called GENDER-NET Plus. Launched in 2017, it brought together scholars from various countries to overcome “challenges in achieving gender equality and gender mainstreaming in research and innovation.”Their final report “Integrating gender analysis into research,” published in The Lancet in July, summarized the scholars’ thoughts on “how to best integrate both sex and gender into studies ranging from social sciences, humanities, and health research.”“Over the last two decades, there has been growing recognition … that sex (a biological variable) and gender (a sociocultural variable) influence research and research outcomes,” they wrote.“Consequently, it has become increasingly important to integrate considerations of sex … and gender into all branches of research to boost accuracy, provide high-quality science, improve reproducibility and generate innovative, equitable and inclusive findings,” the researchers wrote.The scholars pointed out that the National Institutes of Health in the U.S., as well as its Canadian counterpart and the European Commission, all have begun “outlining expectations that sex and gender be integrated in funding submissions and provided some guidance on how to do so.”Still, they concluded that more work needs to be done to ensure “the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of intersectional sex and gender integration [are] promoted across the entire range of research endeavours.”However, the scholars also refused to provide an exact definition of gender. Instead, they wrote that each research team should define it for themselves.
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