Sex and gender approaches in environmental health research: two exemplary case studies of the German environment agency

Abstract

Engaging with the analytical categories of sex and gender in environmental health studies remains challenging in practice but promising with regards to research excellence and scientific benefit. The German Environment Agency reports on two case studies navigating this complex interaction in the fields of health risk assessment of environmental stressors and human biomonitoring studies. It is apparent that the levels of integration of the sex/gender theories and sex/gender data are differently advanced in research. In some areas the collection of sexdisaggregated data has just begun, whereas in others research started engaging with newer gender theories such as embodiment or intersectionality. The practical applications and obstacles in incorporating sex and gender dimensions into environmental health studies are presented and discussed.

Gender Issues in Environmental Health

“…The summary of the research journal is entered into the table according to the format mentioned above. Research made by (Dębiak et al, 2019) the result The sex and gender approaches to research demand individual researcher's awareness and openness, challenge traditional preferences and limitations in perspectives, require gender competency and strengthened efforts but promise new interpretations and better results in return from which men, women and divers genders will profit.…”

Integrating Sex/Gender into Environmental Health Research: Development of a Conceptual Framework

“…There is a growing awareness of the need to integrate sex and gender more comprehensively into health research to enhance the validity and significance of research results providing the evidence basis for prevention measures, health promotion, and health care [1][2][3][4][5]. Nevertheless, until now, sex and gender "as a domain of complex phenomena that are simultaneously biological and social" [6] (p. 1818) has, to a large extent, not been part of environmental health research [7][8][9][10][11]. According to previous reviews, this especially applies to the disciplines environmental epidemiology [12] and environmental toxicology [13][14][15], and, to a lesser extent, to environmental public health research [7,9].…”