LAUSR

“Gender” is a term commonly encountered in the media these days, but it seems that many people are not familiar with the exact difference between sex and gender. “Sex” refers to the biological classification of humans based on their reproductive systems and functions derived from chromosomal type or hormones, while “gender” denotes cultural attitudes and behaviors associated with stereotypical attitudes regarding a person’s sex that shape our conceptions of masculinity and femininity [1,2]. I was also unfamiliar with this terminological distinction and was introduced to the importance of sex and gender-related issues in science at a meeting of the Korean Federation of Women’s Science & Technology Associations in 2014. The Korean Federation of Women’s Science & Technology Associations introduced the concept of gendered innovations to Korea and has been making efforts to spread awareness of these issues in all fields of science, including engineering, architecture, and biomedical science. As part of this effort, the Center for Gendered Innovations in Science and Technology Research was launched in February 2016. In the biomedical field, the main sex and gender-related issues are the lack of gender-based analyses in clinical research and not using both sexes in animal experiments. Because doctors who treat patients know empirically that various diseases, such as irritable bowel syndrome, show a different clinical course in men and women, I readily accepted this concept and realized its importance. The problem of gender imbalance in clinical research has long been recognized; in fact, as early as 1993, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) enacted a policy ensuring that women and minorities are included in all human research and that an adequate number of participants are recruited to analyze gender differences in phase III clinical trials [3]. However, preclinical animal research is still mainly performed on male animals. Sometimes researchers do not perform sex-based analyses in experiments using both sexes, or even do not mention the sex of the experimental animals in the manuscript [4].