Why Does Sex/Gender (Come to) Matter? Researchers' Reasons for Sex/Gender Assessment Illustrate its Context-Dependencies and Entanglements

Abstract

The simultaneous artificiality and reality of social categories such as (dis)abilities, ethnicity, gender, race, sex, sexuality, or social class can pose methodological and ethical problems that can be obscured and aggravated by a lack of transparency about the categories' operational definitions. In the case of sex/gender, for example, theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that mutually exclusive categories such as ‘female’ and ‘male’ can fail to adequately represent human and nonhuman variability and may not meet the standards of scientific measurement. A lack of information about what these or similar labels mean, how they were derived, or what prompted their inclusion in a study can therefore make it difficult to evaluate not only the operationalizations themselves but also the data they yield. In this article, I argue for the consideration of context in the development and evaluation of sex/gender-related assessment methods by exploring the phenomenon's instrumental and abstract roles in research. In an online survey, sixty-four international researchers from various disciplines shared the reasons why they assess or report sex/gender and which purpose sex/gender variables serve in their research. The findings indicate that although researchers' motivation can stem from research topics or general methodological considerations, it is also possible that structural conventions or institutional constraints lead to default inclusions of sex/gender variables. The findings also indicate that sex/gender is attributed with various forms of agency and spatio_temporal (non)locations, ranging from concrete physiological (e.g. hormones) to abstract social concepts (e.g. human history), which could be seen as potential precursors for definitions. The results demonstrate that science is both affected by and contributes to societal constructions of social categorisations, and that sex/gender in research is an entangled, multifaceted, unstable phenomenon. I conclude by proposing to engage in the default assumption that sex/gender is not one thing that can be measured and that the dissonances that surround its assessment could be addressed by identifying and operationalizing aspects of sex/gender that are meaningful in the context of a study.