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  • NATURE INDEX

How South Korea can build better gender diversity into research

To elevate the nation’s science, sex and gender analysis must be embedded in study design.
By
  1. Heisook Lee

    1. Heisook Lee is president of the Korea Center for Gendered Innovations for Science and Technology Research in Seoul.

  2. Heajin Kim

    1. Heajin Kim is a senior researcher at the Korea Center for Gendered Innovations for Science and Technology Research in Seoul.

When designing a research study, integrating sex and gender as variables, such as by including both female and male participants and ensuring transgender people and those who do not fall into binary categorizations are also accounted for, is key to ensuring robust and reproducible results. But this is not being done nearly enough. In medical research, for example, centuries of female exclusion have led to inadequate knowledge and funding of diseases that affect women. In the development of generative artificial intelligence (AI), a lack of sex and gender considerations has perpetuated biases and stereotypes in areas such as image creation and language translation. Such oversights not only skew research findings but also undermine opportunities for discovery. Significant advancements have been made in fields such as cancer immunotherapy, cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis as a result of using sex and gender analysis (SGA) in research, and it has revealed important differences in how men and women metabolize drugs, leading to safer and more effective doses.

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Nature 632, S13 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02688-9

This article is part of Nature Index 2024 South Korea, an editorially independent supplement. Advertisers have no influence over the content. For more information about Nature Index, see the homepage.

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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