Sex and gender in academic studies

[testingmitb]

Not sure if this has been covered before. I use a well known survey site that allows mostly academic users to post studies for completion by a pool of registered users. I've been doing this for 2 or 3 years now for a bit of pin money. Increasingly I'm noting more and more confusion over what data these studies are collecting in terms of demographic info at the end of a study, and just don't understand what use the people constructing these studies think the information is going to be. For example, just now there was a study that asked me for the gender I identify as, and offered the options 'female', 'male' or 'other, n.a.'. It's a mess, isn't it? If there is a free text box I'll write something along the lines of gender being a social construct and that I am biologically female. But these are well-known academic institutions all over the world. Surely as part of a study being oked to go live, is a review of what data they are collecting, for what purpose and what they hope to achieve from each question? Very occasionally a study will ask for 'sex' and offer just female and male and then I find myself actually cheering out loud. Where is the academic rigour?

What's likely to happen is that any user who puts a weird gender identity gets excluded from the results analysis. If you need a pool of 100 participants with the same gender to get statistically significant results, anyone that doesn't put either male or female (or at a pinch non-binary) is just going to get dumped out of the analysis.

Of course, that may have knock-on effects on the results from the residual male/female sample, as the people who identify as non binary are unlikely to be a random subset of the population. What a mess!

Oh that's depressing! I hope that someone sees the comments I make and it provides food for thought, or at least the idea that not everyone buys into this fudging between biology and gender identity (however that is defined!). But where are the academic supervisors, looking at the studies and asking the questions, like 'what data will this question collect?' or 'you ask gender, do you mean biological sex when you ask that question' or ' there is no 'other' option when you are asking for a person's sex'.

Or are the academic supervisors scared to question?

It's often the supervisors encouraging the iffy wording ime.

Hopefully soon it will be acknowledged that there is a difference between ensuring trans people feel welcome and included on campus and distorting data for ideological reasons.

Honestly, up until say 10 years ago, genderc was basically a polite synonym for sex. It was also considered good practice to report gender differences rather than sex differences, because of the social effects of gender stereotyping. If you report something as a sex effect, it implies that it's an innate difference, rather than also influenced by socialisation. That meant that it was a convention to collect gender data not sex data.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work any more because people of male biological sex describe themselves as being female gendered and vice versa, so it all gets mixed up. But because of the convention and the previous interpretation of gender, it comes across as being "essentialist" if you start asking about sex. But it's now necessary, in order to disentangle everything!

I've noticed this too recently on that site. The other day it asked if my gender was male, female or none. I ticked none. I really can't see how they can get useful data asking the question in that way.