Abstract
There is a growing awareness about the need to comprehensively integrate sex and gender into health research in order to enhance the validity and significance of research results. An in-depth consideration of differential exposures and vulnerability is lacking, especially within environmental risk assessment. Thus, the interdisciplinary team of the collaborative research project INGER (integrating gender into environmental health research) aimed to develop a multidimensional sex/gender concept as a theoretically grounded starting point for the operationalization of sex and gender in quantitative (environmental) health research. The iterative development process was based on gender theoretical and health science approaches and was inspired by previously published concepts or models of sex- and gender-related dimensions. The INGER sex/gender concept fulfills the four theoretically established prerequisites for comprehensively investigating sex and gender aspects in population health research: multidimensionality, variety, embodiment, and intersectionality. The theoretical foundation of INGER’s multidimensional sex/gender concept will be laid out, as well as recent sex/gender conceptualization developments in health sciences. In conclusion, by building upon the latest state of research of several disciplines, the conceptual framework will significantly contribute to integrating gender theoretical concepts into (environmental) health research, improving the validity of research and, thus, supporting the promotion of health equity in the long term.
Highlights
We held a joint interdisciplinary discussion, during which we further evaluated those concepts for sex/gender, which were identified and selected during the second stage, with regard to their suitability for population health research and especially environmental health research
The multidimensionality and variety of sex/gender in its intersectional and embodied realization within the context of power relations is expressed in the graphic representation of the sex/gender concept
The conceptual framework developed by the interdisciplinary team of the collaborative research project INGER is intended to provide a theoretically sound starting point for the operationalization of sex/gender in quantitative health research
Summary
There is a growing awareness of the need to integrate sex and gender more comprehensively into health research to enhance the validity and significance of research results providing the evidence basis for prevention measures, health promotion, and health care [1,2,3,4,5]. Until now, sex and gender “as a domain of complex phenomena that are simultaneously biological and social” [6] 1818) has, to a large extent, not been part of environmental health research [7,8,9,10,11]. This especially applies to the disciplines environmental epidemiology [12] and environmental toxicology [13,14,15], and, to a lesser extent, to environmental public health research [7,9].
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