Sex and Gender: Toward Transforming Scientific Practice

This open access book provides an interdisciplinary perspective on the study of sex and gender and suggests directions for future research in multiple fields.

Sex and gender are understood, measured, and applied in different ways across society and science. To foster interdisciplinary dialogue and to promote informed applications in research, policy, medicine, and public health, the Ernst Strüngmann Forum convened scholars from diverse fields to examine a widely held assumption that sex and gender are conceptually separate.

Synthesizing the interdisciplinary perspectives that emerged from this discourse, this volume explores the entanglement of sex and gender, suggesting that they are co-constituted in ways that have not been fully understood. This entanglement is examined from multiple perspectives, research challenges are explored, and ways to move forward are proposed to advance basic and developmental systems biology, human biomedical and clinical research as well as policy and practice.

The book should be of interest to policymakers as well as researchers working in anthropology, behavioral neuroendocrinology, cellular and molecular neuroscience, clinical psychology, epidemiology, and feminist, gender, and transgender studies.

L. Zachary DuBois earned his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2012 and held postdoctoral research positions at Northwestern University and University of Massachusetts of Boston. Currently, he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon, where he also directs the Stress, Adaptation, and Resilience Lab and is a key member of the University of Oregon Biomarker cluster.
His research focuses on resilience, social determinants of health, embodied stigma and inequality, and in expanding and adding nuance to current conceptualizations of gender and sex. His research applies community-based, intersectional, mixed-methods approaches centering the lived experience and health of transgender and gender diverse people. His research has pioneered work furthering our understanding of experiences of stigma and gender minority stress and mapping these onto the body as embodied stressors through integration of minimally invasive biomarker measures. He is also actively involved in collaborative applied research addressing health inequities among transgender and nonbinary youth and LGBTQIA+ people more broadly.
 
Anelis Kaiser Trujillo holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Basel (Switzerland) with additional postgraduate training in Gender Studies. After a postdoctoral fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Bern, she was appointed to professorships at the TU Berlin and the University of Freiburg, where she served as Professor of Gender Studies in STEM from 2017 to 2023. After continuing her work at the Center Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, University of Innsbruck, she now combines work in clinical science with a Lecture position at the University of Basel.

Her research addresses sex/gender differences and similarities in neurocognitive processes, the development of alternative sex/gender models, and the creation of intersectional measurement tools for sex/gender in scientific research. She has also explored the neurobiological mechanisms underlying language in the brain. In 2010, she co-founded the international network NeuroGenderings with Isabelle Dussauge to promote interdisciplinary research on sex/gender in the brain sciences.
 
Margaret M. (Peg) McCarthy received a PhD from the Institute of Animal Behavior at Rutgers University, Newark NJ, completed postdoctoral training at Rockefeller University in New York NY, and was a National Research Council Fellow at NIH-NIAAA before joining the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1993 in Baltimore, Maryland. Rising steadily through the ranks, she was a Professor in the Department of Physiology before becoming the Chair of the Department of Pharmacology in 2011 in which capacity she served until 2024.

McCarthy has a long-standing interest in the cellular mechanisms establishing sex differences in the brain.  She uses a combined behavioral and mechanistic approach in the laboratory rat to understand both normal brain development and how these processes might go selectively awry in males versus females. She has published over 200 peer-reviewed manuscripts and has been cited close to 30,000 times.

After stepping down as the Chair of the Department of Pharmacology, McCarthy became the inaugural Director of the University of Maryland–Medicine Institute for Neuroscience Discovery (UM–MIND). She is a Reviewing Editor for Journal of Neuroscience and a fellow with AAAS and ACNP, former President of the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences, and current President of the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2024.