GC in Academia

[GCinAcademia]

Title says it all really, and I’m sure I’m not the first to ask a similar question.

I’m GC and work in academia, in a health-related discipline.

I’m an early career researcher so find myself torn between staying true to my GC beliefs and not rocking the boat.

I love what I do, and the place I work, but live in fear that I will be ‘outed’ and lose my job.

Equally, I think I have an ethical responsibility not to allow my work to be swayed by gender ideology.

How do others navigate this?

In what sense does it come up? Is it part of every day conversation?

I want to stay anonymous, but can be in various ways.

The main one I was thinking about is that, quite often, sex is relevant to my research.

There have been a couple of times I've been asked to justify, for example, why I have included sex in my research proposal as a binary variable (what about the other options?)...

It's not so much every day conversation.

I sympathise, I work for a university (I'm not an academic) that has just doubled down on gender ideology. It's terrifying. They are very much devotees in the Church of Stonewall.

So far all I have done is corrected factual inaccuracies in policies and presentations. The full EHRC guidance cannot come fast enough.

It sounds very likely you will be able to justify including sex as a binary variable and you would be doing a great job of helping to demystify your enquirer.
It's also likely there a lot of other people in your institution who would be totally on your side even if they ae keeping their heads down for now. Hope you find them soon.

Yes, I have aways managed to justify it before and nobody has challenged me. It always feels though like I am waiting for the other shoe to drop when it comes up.

Most healthcare data used outside of clinical/pharma research is classed as administrative data (derived from but not actually clinical data).

As most sufficiently large healthcare datasets have (small numbers of) men being treated for gynaecological disease and conversely, one cannot be studying sex unless the data has genetic confirmation. Almost no administrative healthcare data has this confirmation.

And it's been like this for ~30 years - the world hasn't ended nor have inappropriate statistical conclusions been reached because the numbers involved are so small. But the numbers aren't 0, so these fields aren't "sex".

For better or worse, an "industry standard" is to classify such data as "gender" - that doesn't mean everyone using "gender" has fully bought into TWAW etc, it's the honest acknowledgement of the contents of the fields and how they interact with other fields.

(Had Alice Sullivan ever done any healthcare research using record level data, her report would have been interesting, accurate and useful.)

I hope you have as stimulating and lengthy career as I have enjoyed to date.

This thread may be of interest to you
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5436351-new-paper-with-language-recommendations-on-sex-and-gender-identity?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=app_share

I am in libraries, a very captured area, and I am often worried this will cause me problems.

I mostly stay pretty quiet about it. I don't really bring it up as a political discussion, although I have probably let drop that I have issues with men in women's prisons.

Overall, I try and stick to (what used to be) the accepted tenants of politically neutral librarianship on all even slightly controversial topics. So I am being consistent whatever the topic and that means I can't be called out as easily on not coming down on a side with one. Although I'd like to think i'd do that anyway as I believe it, though it is currently out of style in the library world.

The only time I really stuck my head about the parapet was when we were redesigning our public washrooms and the architects were pushing for gender neutral. I was pretty clear I did not think our public would accept it, and more than that, with some of our dodgy patrons it could be a serious problem - who wants a young teen girl in the toilets with a guy who was in prison last week for pimping out teen girls?

I don't know what people concluded about my thinking from that but it would have been difficult to contradict the problem without being obviously negligent.

Hang in there. It's going to get easier quite fast and your work will be more future-proof if you manage to make it use sex data not (only) gender data.

It sounds more like a matter of unsuitability in skills than anything related to ideological differences given you are struggling with the interpretation of scientific nuances involved in 'sex'.

Maybe research areas areas that focus on creating, collecting, and organising data or building functional systems, rather than interpreting complex & ambiguous information might be a better fit?

Only if it definitely is sex as opposed to "not sex"; it's not a great idea to pretend data is something it isn't if one wishes to establish and maintain a good reputation. Accuracy and honesty matters.

I am delighted, as always, to see you contribute to a thread. Yet again, you haven't attempted to derail the thread and have only sought to broaden the discourse. I thank you for your efforts. /S

Of course - I didn’t necessarily mean using this type of data, which is inherently messy. But thinking more in terms of primary data collection (e.g. why ask about biological sex, and not just gender identity).

But that was just an example scenario.

It could come up in different ways. I’ve been at conferences where researchers presenting about gynaecological cancer have been asked why they used the word ‘women’ throughout their presentation when (transgender) men can have gynaecological cancer too.

I work in a STEM department (admin) and have stuck my head above the parapet for:

-changing "gender" to "sex" on an internal form
-rewriting some trans/non binary guff in our Athena Swan application
-pushing back on mandatory EDI training that misquotes the law

I have the support of my male line manager, and senior profs (mostly blokes as it's a male-dominated subject).

I have ordered thousands of electronics components, including many male and female connectors for my researchers. Funnily enough, nobody has ever requested a transgender or nonbinary connector to make their experiments more inclusive.

When I was still i the military, so at least 15 years ago, they banned the use of the term "lesbian connector," which I thought was rather heteronormative of them...

This is excellent, thanks for sharing.

A non-binary connector 😂

I do think I'm possibly overthinking it, and that probably the majority in my dept think the same as me.

,😂😂😂 head on over to the AIBU about whether transwomen can have periods. I'm sure the ladies on there can benefit from your wisdom. 😂😂😂

I’m GC in academia and have been pleasantly surprised by the number of other women in science who are quietly GC. We don’t shout it from the rooftop but there are many of us out there

I think there really are hermaphrodite connectors.

afaik no one ever pretends to be confused by connectors or needs anyone to explain which is which.

If you look at the publishing guides for major healthcare research journals, e.g. The Lancet, they are very clear that if sex is relevant it should be measured and reported (in addition to gender, if this is relevant). This might help you justify your choices to others in a simple neutral way.

This ☝️☝️☝️I’m an RG prof. There’s loads of us around, I’ve lost count of the hissed conversations I’ve had over the years. I’ve managed to get a few forms changed. The VC still wants TW in the women’s though (or at least doesn’t want to make a decision). Welcome to the fold.

I usually refer to the Sullivan review, and say that data on sex (not gender) should be collected, because it is the protected characteristic and neither discrimination against women nor discrimination against transpeople can be captured by just asking for gender or gender identity. That has worked well so far.

What AS may believe and say, or that sex is a protected characteristic doesn't alter the fact that almost every healthcare dataset collected by the NHS in England (it may be different in the rest of the UK) that people analyse does not contain data on sex and hasn't for roughly 3 decades (maybe more but very few people research trends that far back).

An example of a dataset that does contain sex is one containing BRCA because it has genetic confirmation; there are very few datasets with BRCA or other genetic tests. As testing becomes more common for diagnostic and treatment purposes, this balance will change but it isn't reality yet.

If it is easy (and it is) to find self-reporting male patients being treated for gynaecological disease, the field cannot validly be thought of or described as a binary sex field. To pretend otherwise is inaccurate, dishonest and will not serve any authors well if they wish to be respected by all of their peers in academia and the clinical world.

Are you saying that because respondents lie about their sex, nobody should bother about asking accurately because the answers won't be reliable anyway?

Is 30 years of flawed data a good justification to continue collecting flawed data?