Dear all,

I attended the Gender Summit 2014 this week. Funnily, there was a very enlightening talk by J. Ramsey (from S. Bahn's group) about sex differences in biomarkers of physiatrics disorders. Overall, in 3 disorders, they found 1 with no sex difference in the biomarkers, 1 with biomarkers that were ONLY accurate for men, and 1 with male-specific and female-specific biomarkers. Based on this, I would strongly suggest that our default hypothesis should be to assume that there will be sex differences in the biomarkers (and we can then test to see if the markers are the same for both sexes). (I'm attaching one ms from them here).

If you agree with this, we should then include this hypothesis everywhere into the proposal structure, including the WP descriptions.

There is also an interesting website that gives examples and guidelines about how to include gender and sex into STEM science, in case you are interested:

http://genderedinnovations.stanford.edu/

best,

Veronica