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In April 2001, the Institute of Medicine published a landmark document entitled, ìExploring the Biological Contributions to Human Health, Does Sex Matter?î This report charted the current state of knowledge on the impact on sex and gender on health and disease outcomes in women and men. Additionally, it outlined opportunities for future research, which would explore how disease processes and health are often impacted by sex and gender. The message was clear, namely, that sex and gender do matter to our understanding of diseases related to nearly every major organ system.

With the dawn of the new millennium, the scientific community has completed a tremendous feat in the cloning of the human genome. With this wealth of information, however, there remains yet only limited understanding regarding how many of these genes may be differentially regulated in males and females. Understanding sex differences in gene regulation is critical to our ability to ultimately translate this information for the improvement of the health and quality of life for men and women everywhere.

The existing critical gaps in our basic understanding of sex differences in human health and disease create not only concerns regarding the status of our medical research and health care but also mark a more general social shortcoming in our nation. From the microcosm of space, sex-based differences also have a significant impact on our national mission of space exploration. Women now represent a significant percentage of National Aeronautics and Space Administrationís (NASAís) astronaut corps and will play an important role in the International Space Station program, and in other space exploration activities this century, perhaps even missions to Mars. We currently have little, if any, data relating to long-term health, safety and performance of women in space.

Without a concentrated, integrated focus on the impact of sex on fundamental biology and biomedical science, our nation will remain unable to fulfill fundamental health care goals, maintain an efficient workforce, or meet the demands of harsh environments encountered in space exploration, military deployment or other specialized endeavors of our society.

In order to certify that men and women can live in space, NASA needs to know the physiological changes that occur during space travel. NASA pioneered bedrest studies utilizing healthy humans. Thus far, flying men and women in space has not revealed gender response differences that cause major health concerns. However with longer duration stays in space, it is increasingly important for NASA to be armed with the knowledge needed to ensure the health and safety of all male and female astronauts.

The application of sex based similarities and differences in healthy people are not restricted to space. Nor are these differences inconsequential. Sex-based biomedicine is important to exposures and occupations as extreme as the Antarctic, high altitude, deep sea, and to communities as diverse as the military, international aid workers, emergency and rescue workers, the elderly and children. 

Pick up any recent policy paper on women’s participation in science and you will find assurances that gender diversity enhances knowledge outcomes. Universities and science-policy stakeholders, including the European Commission and the US National Institutes of Health, readily subscribe to this argument (1⇓–3). But is there, in fact, a gender-diversity dividend in science?

The data suggest that there is. Under the right conditions, teams may benefit from various types of diversity, including scientific discipline, work experience, gender, ethnicity, and nationality. In this paper, we highlight gender diversity (Fig. 1). Guided by key research findings, we propose the following “mechanisms for innovation” specifying why gender diversity matters for scientific discovery and what managers should do to maximize its benefits (Fig. 2). Encouraging greater diversity is not only the right thing to do: it allows scientific organizations to derive an “innovation dividend” that leads to smarter, more creative teams, hence opening the door to new discoveries.

Well-run, well-performing research teams have become increasingly crucial to the success of modern scientific investigations. Already, experimental research points to positive links between gender diversity and collective problem solving. In a study of group performance, Anita Woolley et al. (4) randomly assigned 699 participants to teams of varying sizes and asked them to solve a set of both simple and complicated tasks (e.g., visual puzzles, brainstorming, making collective moral judgments, and negotiating over limited resources). Through these experiments, the authors found evidence of a collective intelligence factor that predicts group performance better than the IQ of individual group members. Key components of this factor include the group members’ social perceptiveness and parity in conversational turn-taking. Furthermore, gender plays an important role: women exhibit higher levels of social perceptiveness and teams with more women achieve greater equality in participation (4). The benefits of increasing women’s representation, however, tend to flatten at the extreme (5). Neither all-men nor all-women teams are the most effective in problem solving. Hence, given the persistent gender gap in science, women represent an untapped potential for boosting the collective intelligence in scientific team work.

Recent discoveries in team science also highlight the importance of gender diversity for effectively using the expertise of each team member. Following 60 interdisciplinary teams of more than 500 scientists and engineers across a variety of disciplines, Aparna Joshi (6) shows that women more often than men accurately recognize the expertise of fellow team members. Based on two surveys—one gathering data about the participants’ work-related and educational background, the other asking participants to evaluate fellow team members’ research expertise—Joshi finds that women are more likely to emphasize educational qualifications when evaluating expertise, whereas men tend to be distracted by irrelevant cues, such as gender. By cultivating gender diversity, teams can overcome such biases and reap the full rewards of team expertise.

Gender diversity may also spark new discoveries by broadening the viewpoints, questions, and areas addressed by researchers. Two new large-scale studies shed light on this point*,†. Using topic modeling—a form of computational text analysis suitable for studying content variations in large samples of scholarly documents—a new study in management science (7) finds that scholarly contributions written by women-dominated author groups typically pose different questions and engage in different research topics than men-authored studies. Articles with women authors are, for example, more likely to adopt critical and employee-centered perspectives on management, whereas men-dominated studies tend to be more prescriptive and operational in their focus. Although pertaining to the realm of social science research, these findings raise intriguing questions of whether similar variations can be detected in science and engineering.

The ‘extreme male brain theory of autism’ describes an extreme male pattern of cognitive traits defined as strong systemising abilities paired with empathising weaknesses in autism spectrum disorder. However, beyond these cognitive traits, clinical observations have suggested an ambiguous gender-typed pattern regarding several sexually dimorphic traits.

The aim of the present study was to investigate if patterns of non-cognitive sexually dimorphic traits differed between the autism spectrum disorder and control groups. Fifty adults with autism spectrum disorder and intelligence within the normal range, and 53 neurotypical controls responded to questions on gender role, self-perceived gender typicality and gender identity, as well as sexuality. Measures used were a Swedish modification of the Bem Sex Role Inventory and questions on sexuality and gender designed for the purpose of this study. Our results showed that one common gender role emerged in the autism spectrum disorder group. Masculinity (e.g. assertiveness, leadership and competitiveness) was weaker in the autism spectrum disorder group than in the controls, across men and women. Self-perceived gender typicality did not differ between the groups but tomboyism and bisexuality were overrepresented amongst women with autism spectrum disorder. Lower libido was reported amongst both male and female participants with autism spectrum disorder compared with controls. We conclude that the extreme male patterns of cognitive functions in the autistic brain do not seem to extend to gender role and sexuality. A gender-atypical pattern for these types of characteristics is suggested in autism spectrum disorder.

Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries continue to present in epidemic-like proportions, carrying significant short- and longer-term debilitative effects. With females suffering these injuries at a higher rate than males, an abundance of research focuses on delineating the sex-specific nature of the underlying injury mechanism. Examinations of sex- dimorphic lower-limb landing mechanics are common since such factors are readily screenable and modifiable. The purpose of this paper was to critically review the published literature that currently exists in this area to gain greater insight into the aetiology of ACL injuries in females and males. Using strict search criteria, 31 articles investigating sex-based differences in explicit knee and/or hip landing biomechanical variables exhibited during vertical landings were selected and subsequently examined. Study outcomes did not support the generally accepted view that significant sex-based differences exist in lower-limb landing mechanics. In fact, a lack of agreement was evident in the literature for the majority of variables examined, with no sex differences evident when consensus was reached. The one exception was that women were typically found to land with greater peak knee abduction angles than males. Considering knee abduction increases ACL loading and prospectively predicts female ACL injury risk, its contribution to sex-specific injury mechanisms and resultant injury rates seems plausible. As for the lack of consensus observed for most variables, it may arise from study-based variations in test populations and landing tasks, in conjunction with the limited ability to accurately measure lower-limb mechanics via standard motion capture methods. Regardless, laboratory-based comparisons of male and female landing mechanics do not appear sufficient to elucidate causes of injury and their potential sex-specificity. Sex-specific in vivo joint mechanical data, if collected accurately, may be more beneficial when used to drive models (e.g., cadaveric and computational) that can additionally quantify the resultant ACL load response. Without these steps, sex-dimorphic landing mechanics data will play a limited role in identifying the aetiology of ACL injuries in women and men.