Holding up half the sky

Professor Kim E. Barrett, Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Physiology

“We must continue our path to ensure that women have equal opportunities to contribute to the scientific enterprise, not least as we learn that the COVID pandemic may have caused us to lose ground in terms of persistent salary inequities. There remains an imperative to ensure that we can harness the talents and interests of a wholly diverse scientific workforce to address the most pressing questions in science and health.”

Professor Kim E. Barrett

I decided to buck the trend in penning this column for Physiology News by not sticking to the theme of thermal physiology. After all, it was clear that my fellow editors had that ground pretty thoroughly covered, and I wasn’t sure I had anything novel to contribute (even though The Journal of Physiology has a proud history of publishing seminal contributions to this field, and continues to encourage submission of work in this important subdiscipline of physiology that is so topical right now). Rather, I am taking the opportunity to reflect on my recent attendance at a meeting of the American Physiological Society on the topic of ‘New Trends in Sex Differences and Women’s Health Research‘, where I had the pleasure to represent our women’s health research efforts at UC Davis with my first personal poster presentation in decades.

The title of this piece is based on a quote that is commonly attributed to Mao Zedong, as he sought to encourage women to contribute actively to the building of modern China, and to move beyond traditional roles. The concept has also been extended to exhort all of us to celebrate the critical roles that are played by women worldwide, and to recognise that, in many countries and/or employment spheres, women still face hurdles to their full and equal participation. 

The conference was an outstanding review of contemporary topics in women’s health as well as the intriguing differences that characterise physiological mechanisms and the expression of specific disease states in women vs. men. While there was substantial focus on reproductive medicine, cardiovascular biology, kidney disease and hypertension, the two-day conference was comprehensive, also extending to topics such as lung biology, enteric infectious diseases, athletic performance, and social determinants of health. 

Indeed, I found myself particularly moved by presentations that explicated the impact of trauma experienced by pregnant women on the subsequent health outcomes of their male offspring (especially poignant in the conference’s setting of New Orleans, which is still reckoning with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina more than 20 years later). Likewise, the recognition that intimate partner violence can impact not only mental, but also cardiovascular, health, underscored an important and ongoing source of health disparities suffered mostly, albeit not exclusively, by women.

Crucially, the demographics of the conference attendees certainly were distinct from almost every scientific meeting I have attended over the course of my career. I don’t have access to precise numbers, but I would venture to guess that female registrants exceeded men by around ten to one. Discussions were remarkably congenial and collaborative, and a sense of collective purpose was palpable in the poster sessions and social events. More importantly, the strong representation of women as organisers, speakers, presenters and staff brought to mind why our knowledge of sex-based physiology, disease expression and outcomes has lagged over years past, without a sufficient base of interested investigators. 

We have made strides in improving the status of women in physiological research, and overt sexism may be behind us, at least based on my personal experience. Certainly, it is pleasing to witness the progress we have made in bolstering the representation of women amongst the Reviewing and Senior Editors on the JP board since I joined it almost 20 years ago. Nevertheless, we must continue our path to ensure that women have equal opportunities to contribute to the scientific enterprise, not least as we learn that the COVID pandemic may have caused us to lose ground in terms of persistent salary inequities. There remains an imperative to ensure that we can harness the talents and interests of a wholly diverse scientific workforce to address the most pressing questions in science and health.

We also continue to debate the importance of considering sex as a biological variable amongst the journals of the Physiological Society, with a joint task force convened to address benefits and barriers. To be sure, a requirement for sex-based differentiation of experimental designs can certainly pose practical as well as financial challenges, especially for work conducted with human subjects exposed to extreme conditions. But I hope we are, at least, beyond the days decried at my recent conference where the sex of (experimental animal) participants was repeatedly not even reported in the methods section of many published papers. We certainly welcome submissions of manuscripts to JP that further help us to understand, and intervene, in the ways in which sex combines with numerous other variables to dictate the outcomes of health and disease.

Find out more about The Journal of Physiology and the journal’s latest call for papers.