OK I need to rant a little (thread). The belief that if you study female animals you MUST take hormones into account is SEXIST.

Literally thousands of male-only grants have been funded and papers published without demands for testosterone or corticosterone assays.

“but but but hormones in females CHANGE EVERY DAY,” you say! Yes, they do. And sometimes that can influence your data. But not always.

If you’re worried about variability, someone has already done the work for you, here. Data from male mice and male rats are just as variable as that from females.

So if you’re worried about how the estrous cycle impacts variability in female subjects, why aren’t you worried about the causes of variability in your male subjects??

I mean, what even causes variability in male subjects? How can we account for that?

Just as with literally anything else in neuroscience, IF there is scientific evidence that ovarian hormones are key players in whatever you’re studying, then of course it’s a good idea to address it.

But I implore people not to treat the estrous cycle as some magical separate thing that a priori NEEDS attention in every experiment. You would never say that about any other signaling molecule, would you?

So ask yourself why people get stuck SPECIFICALLY on the idea that hormones matter so much for females and not males? Ask yourself whether a part of you sees the male brain as “standard,” and the female brain as some sort of altered version of that?

Male and female brains are just two brains that are mostly very similar to each other, but that each have some unique properties, too. If you are specifically interested in how gonadal hormones contribute to these differences then by all means, do those experiments.

But if you’re not, feel free to just do your experiments in females as you would in males.

I want to reiterate that this thread does NOT say that hormone research isn’t important - it is immensely so. The point is that hormones are NO MORE important to females than to males. So claiming that studying females suddenly necessitates the study of hormones is biased.

Great discussions and feedback on this thread. I’m not trying to tell people how to do their research, but to introspect a little on why we view women (and female animals) as so inextricably tied to their hormones, while males, free of this burden, represent “true” biology.

How does this shape the way you design experiments? How you interpret data? How you critique others’ work?

@doc_becca Wait until they hear about aromatization 😅