Sex & Gender Science: Integrating the Social with the Biological

For decades, researchers have studied aspects of sex and gender separately; the former as a basic science and the latter as a social construct with real world consequences, including health inequities. In recent years, as our collective understanding of how the biological and social intersect has advanced, the realization that sex and gender are interactional and deeply interwoven has deepened. It is not either sex or gender but both, ensemble. We are calling this ensemble, Sex & Gender Science, a transdisciplinary, integrative field, combining diverse methods to investigate how sex and gender dynamically interact and influence disease outcomes and illness insights. In this article we propose Sex and Gender Science as an emerging bio-social-medical field and describe the need, its growth, and future directions.