Integrating sex and gender in medical research: co-creating policies

There is growing international recognition that it is best practice for research funders to have sex and gender policies that require grant holders to integrate sex and gender into their research practices and outputs.

In our 2021 preliminary project, we discovered that none of the 17 largest UK medical research funders and regulators has a sex and gender policy in place for the research they fund. This is to the detriment of men, women, trans, non-binary, gender diverse people, and people with intersex variations.

To ensure that evidence can be safely and reliably applied to all people, we need data to be sex and gender-disaggregated and results reported by sex and gender.

Our project will – through an innovative co-creation methodology – work with UK medical research funders and regulators to produce recommendations for sex and gender policies that can be tailored to each institution.

These recommendations, along with educational materials offered to research grant funders and applicants, will update the UK research landscape, which has fallen behind countries, such as Canada and the US.

We intend to learn from and share this co-creation methodology to address other intersectional inequalities in research, including ethnicity, age, and socioeconomic status.