This video is about sex bias in science.
But to get there, we first need to talk about insect private parts…
Like ya do.
I’m Anna and this is Gross Science.
Mantises are tricky to spot because they’re masters of camouflage.
But for mantis researchers, finding them is only the beginning.
How do you distinguish one species from another, especially when they look so similar?
Usually, by looking at their penises.
Well…. sort of.
Male mantises don’t exactly have penises.
They have these: a series of structures that help the male link up, hold on and pass sperm
to the ladies.
And the shapes of these structures help researchers tell hundreds of otherwise similar species
apart.
Now, this strategy makes some sense: male mantis parts do tend to be pretty conspicuous.
But what about female mantises?
Because of the focus on male genitalia, it’s difficult to determine what species a lady
mantis belongs to.
But, for the first time, researchers decided to see if female genitalia could be used to
tell praying mantis species apart.
And what they found so far is that female genitals are indeed pretty different between
groups.
In fact, by examining mantis lady parts, scientists just identified a whole new species.
They described this praying mantis using the female’s unique genitals along with more
traditional characterics, like where it lives, what it looks like and, yes, the male genitals
too.
To honor this historic moment in mantis science, researchers named the insect Ilomantis ginsburgae
after Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court justice who is a champion for women’s rights.
It helps that this patch on the mantis’s neck looks kinda like the lacy jabot that
Ginsburg wears around her neck.
This female-based research approach is one small step towards making our exploration
of the tree of life more rigorous.
Unfortunately, sex bias in research has an impact even closer to home.
It affects medicine, too.
Male lab animals are more often used in research than females because the ladies were thought
to confound experiments with their pesky hormonal fluctuations.
But while studies in female mice suggest that this concern is totally unfounded, the bias
persisted for decades.
For example, at least 63% of pharmaceutical drug studies surveyed from 2009 used only
male mice.
And many scientific studies haven’t even bothered to list the sex of the animals at
all.
To fix this problem, the National Institutes of Health have just started requiring researchers
to label the sex of their animals and to use females whenever appropriate.
But rodents are only half the battle.
Until recently, human females were also studied less than their male counterparts in medical
research.
Some scientists hypothesize that this bias might explain why people with two X chromosomes
more often experience adverse effects from medicines than people with an X and Y.
It wasn’t until 1993 that the NIH actually required that women and people of color be
included as subjects in clinical trials.
(And by the way, inequalities in medicine based on race could and should be its own
Gross Science video.
So stay tuned.)
Anyway, there are many ways in which all humans are the same and require similar care.
But where there are differences between people—whether they’re based on sex or race or something
else—it’s important for us to study rather than ignore them.
Otherwise, our medical system won’t be able to adequately care for everyone.
And that’s gross.
Ew.