Scientific journal asking for authors' gender

[ehtelp]

When submitting a paper to a scientific journal recently I was asked to specify my gender. The options were male, female, non-binary, and prefer not to say. For context this journal is published by the UK 'professional body and learned society' of a very male-dominated scientific field.

I emailed the journal to regarding this, and have received an unsatisfying reply from the 'Research Integrity & Inclusion Manager' (both below). Any suggestions on how to proceed please? (In retrospect my original email could have been better worded.)

My email:

When submitting a paper to Journal X, I have been asked to update my personal details, and in particular to state whether my gender is male, female, non-binary or 'prefer not to say'.

Gender is not a synonym for sex. My biological sex is female. I do not have a gender identity. This is not covered by any of the answers in the drop down menu.

The protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010 are sex and gender reassignment, not gender.

If you wish to collect data regarding protected characteristics, you should ask separate questions regarding sex and gender.

Response:

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

We chose our words carefully, and were guided by literature from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the World Health Organization (WHO) and UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). All of the above define the term "gender identity" and clearly differentiate between sex and gender. The term "gender identity" was first used in 1964 by Robert Stoller, who asserted that it refers to "an individual’s personal concept about their gender and how they feel inside", and may be different to their biological sex. We have chosen to collect data on gender identity, rather than sex, in order to be inclusive of social constructions of gender. We do not say anywhere that we are collecting data regarding protected characteristics.

I don't normally celebrate Elsevier, but I was soooo happy to get this in my inbox last week

www.elsevier.com/connect/editors-update/the-importance-of-sex-and-gender-reporting?utm_campaign=OP1104&utm_medium=email&utm_dgroup=Editors%20Update%20RSS%20Notification&utm_acid=81585481&SIS_ID=&dgcid=OP1104&CMX_ID=&utm_in=DM72066&utm_source=AC_

refers to this very excellent report
researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-016-0007-6

Hooray!

I am trying to politely raise the importance of differentiating sex and gender with my university and this will help hugely. Hope it helps you too ehtelp

Boatyard and Miri, really interesting points re GDPR and DPA 2018, thank you. Just trying to get my head around it.
Boatyard did you mean there is something in GDPR that says you should confine monitoring to legally protected characteristics, or that you shouldn’t just make up your own categories and call that equality monitoring?. If so that would be massive wouldn’t it? I’m struggling to get a handle on this whole area but what you said sounds positive?

Ask for the contact details for their data controller and challenge it on the basis its not a protected characteristic, so why are they collecting it? GDPR grounds

Also what you said Miri:
I think GDPR is where you've got them really, I would ask for details of their data controller and ask them if they conducted a DPIA (data protection impact assessment) as you consider it to be asking a political opinion. Also that you note that gender is not one of the characteristics included as part of the Data Protection Act 2018 Section 8(2) which allows for monitoring of specified persons for equal opportunity or treatment and therefore they cannot claim that exception

Like a lot of others on here I am worried about reliable data collection- like on the 2021 census but seems to be an issue in lots of different areas. If there is a GDPR or DPA 2018 aspect available to use to remind organisations think more carefully about what data they ask for and what they use that for that would be really helpful to understand properly. Can you say any more about any of this?

Nothing to share, but following. So much posted here is very useful.

I'm not a GDPR expert, but I think one of the fundamental rules is that you have to have a specific reason for collecting personal data, it can only be used for that purpose and (I think) you can't hold it indefinitely.
If this body is collecting gender identity data it must have a reason.

Thanks Beamur. Feels like there’s something here to look into for GC people who are concerned about institutional/regulatory capture and the way biological sex is becoming intentionally obscured or erased.
In your post, can the reason for asking be anything you like or is it legally specified what the reason has to be somewhere. And if you say the reason is equality monitoring are there any legal requirements of what that has to look like or include? because that area is completely upended when organisations stop asking about biological sex and just go for gender. Then they are just asking how well people feel they fit in with some sexist stereotypes of ‘femininity’ or ‘masculinity’.

I meant that as a general ‘you’ there

Funnily enough, I dId GDPR on line training for work yesterday. It applies to a very broad definition of personal data likely to include any information relating to an individual, however, there has to be a legal basis to process the data.

Like Chattylion, I'm trying to understand the DPA2018, and how it can be used to argue against the legality of collecting data regarding gender/gender identity for 'equality monitoring purposes'.

Under part 2 "Substantial public interest conditions" the specified categories of personal data which can be collected for "Equality of opportunity or treatment" 8 (2) are:

Personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin
Personal data revealing religious or philosophical beliefs
Data concerning health
Personal data concerning an individual's sexual orientation

So gender/gender identity isn't included (unless it's classed as a philosophical belief...), but neither is sex. Is sex covered elsewhere? Or am I misunderstanding something?

I suspect sex is considered standard personal data but a lawful reason for collecting it must be stated.
Gender identity is not the same as sex and I reckon correlates more closely with being special category data. Which requires both a legal basis and a separate condition for processing (under Article 9 of the GDPR). Looking at the ICO website (which is very helpful) you need to meet 10 conditions for processing special category data, you may need an 'appropriate policy document' and you must complete a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) for any high risk data.
You cannot toggle or change the purposes for collecting data. Consent must be specific and informed.
A person is entitled to know why you are collecting their personal data and exactly what will be done with it.
The ICO website is easy to follow.

Cant find the link at the moment but WHO still says sex is the biological reality and gender the social construct ie learnt roles. There's a reference to it on this UK Gov web page www.ons.gov.uk/economy/environmentalaccounts/articles/whatisthedifferencebetweensexandgender/2019-02-21

So why would a scientific journal want to record a learnt role?

It could be interesting to record both, ie sex and gender identity, but in all seriousness most people would not know what was meant.

If as mentioned above they are wanting to show they are not being discriminatory then they should use the EA protected characteristics, and that isn't gender idendtity, it is gender reassignment.

So what it comes down to is why are they asking this anyway? (And as I said as most people dont have a gender identity it makes it statistically irrelevant.

This just seems like pointless posturing.

This is an interesting thread. I am just in the process of composing an email to my professional regulator who now asks about "gender identity" rather than sex in the equality and diversity monitoring form. I have been putting it off but I have stolen a few ideas from this thread and now have something near decent to send :)

I’d take the conversation completely away from gender . Ignore it in fact....

and ask why they are not including sex, a protected characteristic under the equality act, especially, as curiousmonkey says, in a male dominated field.

Ask if they would please add sex?

I’d be very interested to see if they say no...

In order to be inclusive of social constructions of gender

Why?

Why do they have to ask the question at all?

Your replies are great OP.

Unfortunately I think the answer is that they really couldn't care less about equality or statistics.

The data they collect will highlight non-binary people, but not collect any data on the protected characteristics of sex or gender reassignment. The data will be particularly useless if, as you say, numbers of women involved in this field are low.

Well I suppose this is their way round having women under represented in the field.

Why bother encouraging women to get involved when you can just start saying there are loads of (gender identified) women!

Sometime organisations should ask about gender identity because sometimes that is a relevant question, but I don’t think that there is an obligation to ask about gender in addition to asking about biological sex every time- sometimes you only need to know biological sex. And legally you’re only ever supposed to gather the minimum of any data you need.

However, asking about gender identity but not asking about sex at the same time is only very rarely going to be appropriate, like maybe only in a survey about gender identity. It would never be appropriate to only ask about gender (not asking about sex) if the aim is monitoring everyone in a sample for equality purposes.

Thanks for ICO tip Beamur. I will have a look.

I conducted research at a woke university 2 years ago. I was made to replace Sex with Gender. I also had to add "other" to male: female: other: prefer not to say.

When I said I was unhappy with this as there are only 2 sexes and I was doing a sex based survey (yes there are not enough eye rolls for this) my professor (female) went "blah, blah, blah, University Policy, inclusion, blah blah, Intersex...

I ended up with one person filling in other, and no one filling in non binary. The person who filled in other had to be removed from my analysis as we had to have male and female data to compare with historical data.

And yes, the irony was not lost on me that someone who instigates hundreds of international research projects every year, did not foresee this problem.

ehtelp that is really confusing. How could you measure sexual orientation for equality monitoring purposes without measuring sex?

The thing is that there seems to be a clear problem in academia where women suffer a penalty for having children

www.theguardian.com/education/2020/may/12/womens-research-plummets-during-lockdown-but-articles-from-men-increase

www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/02/27/women-who-have-children-are-still-disadvantaged-academe-opinion

www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01294-9

It's possible that there is also clear evidence of direct and indirect discrimination against transgender people, although that would affect a smaller percentage of the population.

However, it's not clear that anyone suffers discrimination purely because of their gender identity, partly because it's an internal sense of self, that might not actually be visible to other people. So when they say that they are asking this question to monitor diversity what is the problem they are trying to address?

Annasgirl
I ended up with one person filling in other, and no one filling in non binary. The person who filled in other had to be removed from my analysis as we had to have male and female data to compare with historical data.

How could you compare your male and female data to historical male and female data when one was sex and the other was asked as gender, with non binary (which isn't intersex - I know you know, I'm just going through the logic!) as an option, so clearly not sex. Your data was far more open to having biologically sexed people ticking the opposite sex box.

I really wonder how this works in reality. Do you have to note in your research that there's a difference in how you classified your population in comparison to earlier studies?

So gender/gender identity isn't included (unless it's classed as a philosophical belief...), but neither is sex. Is sex covered elsewhere? Or am I misunderstanding something?

(I am not a GDPR expert just someone who is interested so I may not be 100% and bow down to anyone with superior knowledge).

Neither sex nor gender are included in GDPR. Your sex would be considered personal data so for example if you are filling out a form to join a leisure centre, it is perfectly reasonable for the form to ask your sex because it is relevant to the provision of services. Now if I was asking you to fill out a form for a parking permit, asking your sex wouldn't be relevant, so the organisation would have to prove why it is relevant or not to ask (or not make the question compulsory). Nevertheless there are so many things that ask sex unnecessaily on a daily basis when they don't need to know its not worth fighting most of them

There are exceptions for equality monitoring questions for example asking someones race, sexual orientation, health, religious beliefs but gender or even gender reassignment doesn't fall under that so you would need to objectively justify why you needed to know that. So even though sex isn't included as a category under the specified equality monitoring categories of the DPA, you could easily justify it on the basis of sex being a protected characteristic and the importance of knowing that women are being represented.

So lets say I decide to include a question about hair colour as a question for submitting science papers because I think blondes are under represented, its not one of the categories that I can use the equality monitoring exception, its not a protected characteristic, so I would have to justify that, why its necessary that I know, what I'm going to do with it etc,why does it matter if I have more blondes represented, would it matter if they were bottle blondes rather than natural blondes? It would be incredibly difficult to try and justify asking a question under equality monitoring that does not have anything to do with a protected characteristic while simultaneously not asking about the protected characteristic i.e. if I asked a question about hair colour but not race in my equality monitoring (see also asking about gender but not sex)

IMHO gender should be considered a political opinion but we don't have any case law on that yet.

As far as suggest that if I am comfortable with my identity I should select female, or otherwise 'prefer not to say', offer to make a note on my account that I don't have a gender identity. this is a major red flag, they are asking you to provide incorrect information despite the fact that GDPR makes it clear that you have a right to have your information recorded correctly (eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679&from=EN#d1e2589-1-1) Article 5(1d).

The person you are emailing has no idea about GDPR and what they are allowed to ask.

@anotherhumanfemale - they were asked gender, male, female, other, prefer not to say. All of the people who answered male or female were male or female (due to my data selection method, the population skewed slightly older (over 45 majority) so I would take it that they were looking at it as male or female sex for gender (as it was when I was a child and later as an adult up to about 10 years ago). I also cannot understand how academics can tell us to put male or female for gender since this is clearly sex - gender is masculine or feminine if we want to be pedantic.

I did not publish - it was only for my Masters and I could not be bothered dealing with the lack of real life understanding of these people any longer to have entertained spending another 6 months communicating with them to get it published.

But your point is correct - that was my original point but the academic supervisor felt that removing the "other" was enough to allow comparison. As I say, no modern research is comparable to anything which took place over 5 years ago due to the insistence on putting in gender identity instead of sex.

Thanks @Beamur and @miri1985 for the helpful replies.

[This next bit isn't aimed at anyone here, it's a rant into the vacuum.] To a scientist, the wording of the DPA2018 is frustratingly imprecise. If sex is standard personal data which doesn't need to be included in the specified categories of personal data that can be collected for equality monitoring, why is the same not true for the other protected characteristics that are specified (race, religion and sexual orientation)? If the list is illustrative rather than exhaustive, it leaves open an argument that if health data can be collected so can gender/gender identity data.

I think in this case the arguments are strong enough, without getting into legal arguments that aren't (to this scientist at least) as clear cut as they could/should be.

Also, FWIW, there are various reasons why I'm arguing that they should ask for sex in addition to, rather than instead of, gender/gender identity. Academia is a very woke place. I'm not arguing for what I believe is the best solution. I'm pushing for a solution that is acceptable to me, that I think may be achievable, and that can be argued for in a way which is (hopefully...) unlikely to cause personal professional damage.