I'm done with the Zoe COVID study

[SchoolNightWine]

I've been part of the Zoe COVID study since it started - felt like I was 'doing my bit'
Today I got this email about a menopause study...
I am disheartened, angry and furious that I've wasted time on them (while going through so many menopausal symptoms) when according to them anyone who identifies as female could take part in the menopause survey.
I've emailed to let them know my disgust and deleted the app, but wanted their views to be known wider so hope it's ok to share it here.

Well if any one that ‘identifies as a woman’ can take part, then that would mean the data is inaccurate and any significant findings and results are null and void. Instead of going for inclusive cookies, they could have done something that really helps women but no, they chose feelings over accuracy. Makes me cross.

Oh ffs, all they are saying is that if you entered the female when you signed up, you will receive the email. They are not accessing your health records so they don’t know for sure. We NEED covid data on order to be able to mitigate the risks. If you’re going to stomp off and delete the app fine but to rant about it on a site with thousands of users is just stupid and irresponsible.

Same. Got halfway through, saw the misogyny, and binned it.

If you’re going to stomp off and delete the app fine but to rant about it on a site with thousands of users is just stupid and irresponsible.

Why do you think this nonsense is happening? Because they're scared of of people making a fuss if they don't recite the nonsense.

"Don't make a fuss about the nonsense" is not a strategy to counter that.

Women need to be making far more of a fuss.

Organisations need to become wary of doing stuff like this because they know it will cost them.

I thought the same, although I think it’s just sloppy wording, ie that they will send the email about the survey to everyone who identified, when they signed up, as female, but presumably (surely?) there will be some screening questions so that only female sexed women complete the survey.

It’s a bit bizarre that they aren’t also sending the survey to any participants who identify as male/non-binary/anything else, because some of those people will also be female-bodied and experience the menopause…

Has anyone ever emailed ZOE before, and if so, do they write back?

They've not said that at all Crudger.
They're a health / science / data based app who are too terrified to use accurate sex based language in fear of the trans extremists and are therefore collecting inaccurate data. Shame on them.

They also spelt ‘receive’ wrong. Their command of language is clearly not their strength.

But how is the data extrapolated helpful if the input is shitey lies?

I joined pretty much as soon as it was launched. They asked about sex, all was fine. After a short time they changed to gender nonsense wording and I deleted the app. I emailed at the time but no response.

No research they do will be worth the paper it's printed on. What I find worrying now is that they will tout their findings as proving xyz when they will have missed a significant portion of thr female population through ideologically-led sloppy data capture and will include (in a MENOPAUSE study) data for men who say they are women. Not just pointless but potentially harmful!

it a good example of a clash between “inclusion” and “accuracy” in scientific research and it sounds like inclusion is more important than accuracy for Zoe.

Tangentially relevant: I don't use the app but the points raised here about the data collection are exceptionally important. I'm at uni studying psychology and students are almost all using "identification" in their research. The fact they don't seem to understand that sex relates to immutable biology and identification to culturally informed stereotypes and that the difference is important (unless you're specifically studying identification) is worrying for the future of research.

That Covid data is perhaps less useful if a it’s not helping researchers understand how it affects people of each biological sex though? How do we effectively mitigate risks without being secure on the understanding of what men and women’s biology does in reaction to the virus. Early in the pandemic it was made clear that men were considered more vulnerable than women so some advice was tailored to that. Not people who identified as men; that’s a different thing.

Hang on, the email the OP posted (that I also got), says they’ll be emailing those who identified as female AND who told ZOE their menopause status. So presumably that’s the way they are filtering out male-bodied people who identified as female. I don’t think we can be certain that they are including male-bodied people in their menopause research.

Still not clear why they didn’t ask participants who identified as male /non binary whether they have periods and what their menopause status was, and would then be able to include some of them in their menopause study too…

How is that going for you a uni @aweegc? I can imagine uni is quite a scary place for people who are GC and are using sex over gender in their work! Agree very worrying for future of research!

I think they are just listing the criteria by which you are automatically emailed for the survey.

This is what happens when academics or developers write messages without involving a user advisory group to critique them for ease of reading, appropriate language, and commonsense.

They could have written that so much better and in a way that would have encouraged sign-up for the menopause study rather than alienated potential participants.

they are missing any male identified trans who are female and menopausal.

True. However, the number of this group or NBs who would be motivated to ignore their dysphoria sufficiently to participate in a study of menopause must be remarkably small. Added to which it will depend if there has been a history of T use, whether there were medical interventions (removal of ovaries) etc. It would be an interesting subgroup, not least if they skewed young for going through this and having both medical and surgical interventions.

But there is a small (but potentially statistically significant) number of female-identifying men who claim to experience menopause because of the hormone therapy they take. It’s of course entirely possible that none of them are in the Zoe study as I don’t think this is mainstream thinking, but as it stands there’s no way to know. The only way to be certain would be to ask people about their sex at birth, not how they identify.

I joined the Zoe study at the very beginning when it launched for Covid, then they started asking nonsense non-scientific questions about gender and gender “assigned at birth” instead of sex. Considering how Covid does discriminate on the basis of sex (men being more adversely affected) I was disappointed that the Zoe app was so unscientific and so I emailed a complaint, received no ack nor response of any sort, and subsequently deleted the app. Tim Spector needs to sort this out. I believe much of the Zoe team is US based which might explain the woke nonsense.

We need accurate scientific data, and including or excluding certain groups does not get this.

With the number of participants in the Zoe covid study there will be such a tiny number of people identifying as anything other than their sex at birth that it won’t affect the stats. It’s really not worth getting worked up over.

I think they are just jumping on a bandwagon. There are plenty menopause apps around already.

Menopause is more of a talking point because of the hard work of BMS in getting NICE guidelines through in 2015 and then the years of follow up and awareness to try and get training to doctors to be able to get them to use them.

They have done well out of covid and need something to move onto (where have we heard that story before? 🤔)

They can bog off with their divisive 'inclusive' language.

It makes me sweary... and as a perimenopausal women ... that is not a pretty sight!

It is the train of logic that by identifying as female we identify into our oppression and the logical fallacy that as we identify into it, we therefore accept it.

Rage, rage, rage against the lunacy... even if it means we get fewer female results in the data.... we already know that many medical studies largely ignore the difference between the sexes...

The authors of these questions need to understand that if we are to trust them with our data, they have to earn our trust.

The phrases '50% of us will go through menopause' and 'if you identify as female' are a stark reminder that the authors do not understand their audience or indeed science... so are not worthy of our time, effort or data.

Much happier with the wording on todays email. Maybe enough people got in touch to make them think about what they're writing...

Considering that most of the middle-aged men who decide to transition call themselves after the latest popular female teenage singer and buy their clothes from outlets popular with teenage girls, I doubt many self-identified "women" would be pretending to go through the menopause.

I deleted the Zoe app ages ago on the basis the data they're collecting is meaningless. As a PP said they did begin with sex then moved to the "identify as" bollocks.

You’re all being very mean & unreasonable, expecting medical researchers to upend centuries of totally ignoring women.

It’s not like The Real People™️ are going to get hurt by this even if the main study data is of dubious quality for them too, just lowly Support Humans - & we all know there’s a literal surplus of us. In some places they’re literally throwing us away as neonates for goodness sake.

Honestly, do your husbands know you’re messing around here, Having Opinions like this? Disgraceful.