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For the past three years, Bruce McLaren and Jessica Hammer have studied how children interact with Decimal Point, an educational game that bolsters maths skills.
More than 1,500 children have played the game, helping the pair of researchers, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to uncover a potentially powerful trend — girls seem to benefit more from playing the game than do boys1. McLaren and Hammer’s work aims to understand how gender plays a part in digital learning and, in doing so, provides an opportunity to improve the design of educational games for children.
Their work has now become much harder. On 18 April, McLaren received an e-mail from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) saying that funding for the project, which was supposed to run until next year, was being terminated. “Although I had some inkling of the possibility of the grant being cancelled — in particular, because of its focus on gender — I was nevertheless taken aback and very disappointed,” McLaren says.
Hammer, too, was upset, but feels lucky that they got as far as they did. Other researchers have not been so fortunate. In April, the NSF terminated more than 400 grants after a Department of Government Efficiency review that started in February. Most terminated grants focused on funding for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and misinformation research.
Sethuraman Panchanathan, director of the NSF, suggested that the awards were terminated because they did not align with the agency’s priorities. “Research projects with more narrow impact limited to subgroups of people based on protected class or characteristics do not effectuate NSF priorities,” his statement read. Similar cuts have affected the US National Institutes of Health (NIH): some 800 grants have been cancelled, with a majority of the cuts focused on research investigating health of people from gender and sexual minorities (LGBTQ+), according to a Nature report in April. (The NSF did not respond to a request for comment, and Panchanathan resigned on 24 April.)
The sweeping cancellation of more than US$2 billion in funding has left researchers confused, frustrated and concerned about the future. “I think that these changes affect all of us as scientists and researchers,” says Hammer. “Saying that you can’t look at reality — that’s the first step to bad science.”
Scientists who spoke to Nature Index said they were worried that hard-earned gains made to include sex and gender as variables in scientific research were being rapidly eroded, which could lead to lower-quality research and long-term decline of the US scientific enterprise. One senior scientist, who has for several decades worked on DEI initiatives but did not wish to be named, said: “In the long run, we end up in a place where science is not as illuminating, where the possibilities are greatly limited and where people will suffer.”
Gains at risk
As recently as the 1970s, women were excluded from clinical trials. Over the past three decades, there has been a concerted global effort to include sex and gender analysis in research, to ensure that findings are comprehensive, equitable and applicable to everyone. A raft of policy guidelines and regulatory changes have been made in Europe, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.
The United States had been at the forefront of this shift. In 1993, the NIH Revitalization Act was signed into law, mandating that all NIH-funded clinical research include women and people from minority ethnic groups. In 2015, the NIH broadened the scope of its policies to ensure that preclinical studies also accounted for sex and gender.
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Historical inequities persist, such as women being under-represented in clinical trials and many studies not accounting for transgender and non-binary people2. However, countries with progressive funding policies, and journals that require or encourage sex- and gender-based analysis in the articles they publish, have seen significant improvements in research quality and publication rates over the past 20 years, a study published late last year found3.
Those gains are now at risk in the United States, and the major impacts will not be on just women and LGBTQ+ individuals. When these analyses are ignored, everyone loses, says Saralyn Mark, who between 1999 and 2017 worked as the senior medical adviser for women’s health at NASA. “Ignorance is not bliss — it’s lethal,” she says. It’s important to understand the impact of sex and gender differences in many contexts, Mark adds, “because a one-size-fits-all approach does not work”.
Mark now heads iGiant, a non-profit company in Washington DC that aims to accelerate translation of sex and gender research into design elements in products and policies, among other things. She says there are many examples showing how including sex and gender analysis in research has resulted in significant translational benefits. Studies have shown that men and women’s immune systems respond differently to the extremes of spaceflight, for instance4. In space, “the body adapts very quickly and very dramatically, and you can discern very small differences between the sexes”, says Mark. She cites another example: redesigning the cockpit of 18-wheeler trucks to accommodate women can make the vehicles safer overall.
More broadly, sex and gender analysis has led to advancements in areas such as cancer immunotherapy and cardiovascular disease and has revealed key differences in how men and women metabolize drugs.
The benefits are obvious in Hammer and McLaren’s work, too, they say. “What we’re learning is not just about gender,” Hammer says. “Rather, gender provides this opportunity for us to understand the underlying mechanisms that are driving learning.”
