Scientific paper using 'gender' where they mean 'sex'

[OddBoots]

I'm just a student not a scientist but I read a lot of papers. I was very surprised this week to read through PubMed an abstract of a epigenetics paper that referred to gender-specific markers in embryos.

Would it be really petty of me to email the publishers? I have been mulling it for a couple of days and it has really surprised and concerned me that scientists would get it wrong.

not thik
Think

I'm feeling confused!

So if sex and gender are sometimes interchangeable, and sometimes aren't, depending on what you're talking about

And in day to day life gender is increasingly being used instead of sex

Then to all intents and purposes I think gender and sex are interchangeable, now?

So what would a better word for gender be? Is there one to use? Else everyone is going to get horribly confused (and are to a certain extent already) when trying to talk about gender (when they mean something different from sex)...

Or something?

Madonna, I don't know much about epigenetics, but isn't part of it about environmental impacts on later generations. Sort of, if you smoke there may be an epigenetic consequence for your grandchildren?

So it is possible that oppression of females 100 years ago has epigenetic consequences for their grand daughters.

In which case it would be correct in the social sciences use of the word to say that embryos have a gender? Because socially created conditions for females are having an impact on female embryos, before anyone even knows they are female?

ozy because sex and gender are often used to mean completely different things like this: WHO definitions

I don't know that much about epigenetics either. And I never had to refer to sex and/or gender in my science research. I'm pretty sure when I started teaching, I said sex merely as gender felt like the prim version... I only started thinking about it when I did the psychology, several years later.

Ozymandias, gender is often used politically/socially to mean masculine/feminine rather than male/female.

An embryo doesn't yet have a gender in the social/cultural/identity sense, so I don't think the use of 'gender' in this context would result in confusion.

Well unless you think that gender is innate, in which case it makes perfect sense to say an embryo has a gender (although which gender it has may not be known / revealed until much later if the embryo gets that far). I don't know if people who believe that gender is innate would take into account the social factors that might make a person freer / less free to understand their options in it IYSWIM but that's probably a separate conversation.

Whirlpool, but surely the major point of epigenetics is that a lot of biology is not innate, and so the biological development of an embryo is caused by a number of social factors?

Beyond epigenetics, sex selective abortions is social, and any embryo whose sex is known by others then definitely has a gender role.

I don't think biologists use sex and gender interchangeably. In biology sex usually refers to the exchange of DNA, whereas gender refers to male/female etc. In humans there are 2 genders that always reproduce sexually, but not all organisms are that straightforward. Some species have severally genders and reproduction may or may not involve sex.

The confusions happens because in the humanities sex means male/female.

several damn you autocorrect

Oh I don't know anything about epigenetics! I do know that some people think gender is innate though, immutable in the same way sex is, so they would presumably think an embryo would have a sex and a gender which may or may not match.

I would have thought, anyway.

Agree about sex selective abortion being a gender role.

And thinking about it, those who believe that sex is a feeling, and gender is the true reflection of what a person is, would be quite comfortable with using gender instead of sex. Although then presumably defining whether an embryo is one gender or another, based on markers that are traditionally used to decide sex, would be highly inappropriate.

MQ, no, biologists use sex to mean an element of the sex of an organism, such as its chromosomal sex or gonadal sex.

I should make it clear that I know nothing whatsoever about epigenetics.

I was reading recently (possibly on here?) about changes to the brain in primary carers of babies - both male and female carers, as opposed to secondary carers. If a. those are epigenetic changes that can be passed on to multiple generations and b. epigenetic changes can be passed on to one sex only, is it not possible that men (or indeed anyone) might be born less capable of primary caring because their grandfathers didn't do any primary caring? And they could make multiple generations of male descendants better carers if men started primary caring now.

I don't know. But the Swedish famine study (different health outcomes for grandsons of grandfathers who had lived through the famine) makes it seem possible that if we can pass on health benefits due to how we live, we can potentially pass on social traits in ways that are neither cultural nor genetic.

But I could be totally wrong, as I am discussing it from a position of ignorance. I think there were some female scientists discussing it in Nature.

Presumably OddBoots does know something about the topic and might return to tell us more!

I would say both the biological and the social create the biological and the social. I am sure someone else will have said that better.

Yes. And there are no 'natural' environments left. They have all been modified by human social activity. Agriculture has changed humans and the environment.