ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
Perils and pitfalls of reporting sex differences.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 80 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
80 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A systematic review on the effect of individual characteristics and management practices on equine cognition.Animal cognition · 2025Pooled it
- A systematic review of participant diversity in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy trials.Psychiatry research · 2025Pooled it
- Multivariate Models of Animal Sex: Breaking Binaries Leads to a Better Understanding of Ecology and Evolution.Integrative and comparative biology · 2023Pooled it
- Integrating sex and gender in studies of cardiac resynchronization therapy: a systematic review.ESC heart failure · 2022Pooled it
- Structural, Functional, and Metabolic Brain Differences as a Function of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation: A Systematic Review of the Human Neuroimaging Literature.Archives of sexual behavior · 2021Pooled it
- Sex Differences Between Female and Male Individuals in Antipsychotic Efficacy and Adverse Effects in the Treatment of Schizophrenia.CNS drugs · 2024Trial
- High-fat diet exposure, internal state, and reward value influence decision making during motivational conflict.Neurobiology of stress · 2026Article
- Claims of sex-dependent effects in the behavioral and brain sciences are infrequently supported by valid statistical comparisons.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Gendering the Menstrual Cycle in Behavioral Neuroendocrinology.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2026Review
- Mechanisms of entanglement: how a gendered world makes a gendered brain.Biology of sex differences · 2026Review
- The "sex-specific effect:" Evaluating analytical approaches to sex-dependence in the behavioral and brain sciences.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Differential Impacts of Fronto-Cerebellar tACS and tVNS on Motor Learning: Evidence for Sex-Related Neural Modulation.Neural plasticity · 2026Article
- Dynamic brain lateralization patterns in Chinese naturalistic language comprehension and association with sex differences: a 7T functional magnetic resonance imaging study.Psychoradiology · 2026Article
- Puberty in Context: Accounting for Psychosocial Experiences in the Association Between Pubertal Timing, Sex/Gender, and Adolescent Depressive Symptoms in Canadian Youth.Depression and anxiety · 2026Article
- Sex and Gender Identities Are Emergent Properties of Neural Complexity.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Sex/gender entanglement: A problem of knots and buckets.Biology of sex differences · 2025Review
- Article
- Longitudinal Sex-at-Birth and Age Analyses of Cortical Structure in the ABCD Study.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Guidelines for sex-specific considerations to improve rigor in renal research and how we got there.American journal of physiology. Renal physiology · 2025Review
- More similarity than difference: Comparison of within- and between-sex variance in early adolescent brain structure.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
20 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
The idea of sex differences in the brain both fascinates and inflames the public. As a result, the communication and public discussion of new findings is particularly vulnerable to logical leaps and pseudoscience. A new US National Institutes of Health policy to consider both sexes in almost all preclinical research will increase the number of reported sex differences and thus the risk that research in this important area will be misinterpreted and misrepresented. In this article, I consider ways in which we might reduce that risk, for example, by (i) employing statistical tests that reveal the extent to which sex explains variation, rather than whether or not the sexes 'differ', (ii) properly characterizing the frequency distributions of scores or dependent measures, which nearly always overlap, and (iii) avoiding speculative functional or evolutionary explanations for sex-based variation, which usually invoke logical fallacies and perpetuate sex stereotypes. Ultimately, the factor of sex should be viewed as an imperfect, temporary proxy for yet-unknown factors, such as hormones or sex-linked genes, that explain variation better than sex. As scientists, we should be interested in discovering and understanding the true sources of variation, which will be more informative in the development of clinical treatments.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.