Reply to comment

I'd like to get back to a subject that Rebecca brought up about science using a binary to assign sex and then only actually doing research on males.  This is especially true in rodent models, where, as Rebecca said, the estrous cycle is thought to be too confounding, and females are simply not used.  This is a topic I've thought about a lot, especially since both major research projects I've worked on have involved animal models of fear or anxiety.  The prevalence of anxiety and depression in women is much higher than that in men.  Models of treatment for these disorders come directly from animal research.  If males and females have a different incidence of these disorders, it's conceivable that they also react to treatment differently.  So how can we extrapolate animal models that have only been tested on males to say that the same treatments will be effective in females?  Maybe there's a treatment for depression or anxiety disorders that would be particularly efficacious for women, but it'll never be discovered if animal research continues to be conducted on males only.  In reality, while the estrous cycle in female rodents may make experiments more complicated, I don't see how it can't be incorporated into research.  It'd require several more experimental groups, and therefore, more subjects, but if you can separate out stages of the estrous cycle, you can get a lot of valuable information about the female brain and behavior that's been previously ignored.  There are ethical issues to consider, with the increase in the number of animals needed for experiments like this, but overall, I think the benefits of collecting data about females in order to be able to better diagnose and treat women with mental and physical health issues far outweigh the costs.