How Canada is taking the lead on research into gender and sexuality

Canada is a world leader in sex and gender studies, thanks in part to three researchers in the Canada 150 Research Chairs Program (C150). The $117.6 million program, announced in the Government of Canada’s 2017 Budget, brought two dozen of the world’s most talented researchers and scholars to Canadian institutions from across a wide range of disciplines.

Among those recruited internationally were Sari van Anders, C150 in Social Neuroendocrinology, Sexuality and Gender/Sex, to Queen’s University; Judith Mank, C150 in Evolutionary Genomics, to The University of British Columbia (UBC); and Shireen Hassim, C150 in Gender and African Politics, to Carleton University. The trio has contributed extensive new knowledge to the science, politics and societal implications of sex and gender.

Sari van Anders: “This work matters”

In her 10 years at the University of Michigan, van Anders led the way in feminist bioscience, gender/sex diversity, and sex research. She created sexual configurations theory—a new way to conceptualize, measure and explore how people experience their genders, sexes and sexualities.

Nevertheless, van Anders decided the time was right to return to her native Canada when she heard about the C150 program.

“In Canada, there’s an understanding that this work matters,” van Anders says. “It comes from the support for diversity, and it’s a model for global approaches.”

At Queen’s, van Anders set up a lab focused on feminist and queer science. A leader in the field of social neuroendocrinology, she is getting a hormone section of the lab up and running to study the impact of gendered and social experiences on testosterone levels. Until now, most research has only looked at the reverse relationship, how hormones impact behaviour.

“It was definitely worth the move,” van Anders says. “C150 has really given us the space to do this high quality, high impact research. We’ve been really excited about how successful we’ve been.”

One understudied research area the van Anders Lab pursued is low sexual desire in women, which had long been framed as a medical problem or dysfunction. In 2022, van Anders co-authored a paper that showed a societal connection instead: gender inequity in household labour was a predictor of lower sexual desire in women partnered with men. It won an Outstanding Theoretical Paper Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, one of the highest honours for sexuality theory research. This body of work and a related piece in The Conversation have already been downloaded nearly three quarters of a million times. Couples’ therapists have reached out directly to van Anders to say the research has helped their clients get to the root of their problem.

“People are telling us how much this work means to them,” van Anders says.

Other ways she has made her work available and impactful include through the free Mapping Your Sexuality zine, which has been translated into four languages; expert witness work about gender/sex; educational sessions on “gender/sex/uality in/justice”; and consulting with federal agencies about defining and measuring gender/sex in expansive and inclusive ways.

Judith Mank: “There are many, many ways to be male or female”

Mank, too, found a warm, supportive environment for her research as a C150, at UBC. She was recruited from University College London and, before that, taught at the University of Oxford. 

At UBC, Mank’s is a lab of “motivated and insightful young people” studying the differences between the sexes from an ecological and genomic perspective.

“There’s been a huge focus on sex and gender diversity of late and that’s one aspect that we’ve been studying to try and understand—the natural history of how it comes about. There are many, many ways to be male or female, not just one,” Mank says.

She points to a fish that has one type of female, but five different types of males, all of which look and act very different from each other. Other fish change sex midway through their life.

Mank first earned a degree in anthropology before moving into genetics, giving her unique insight into the building blocks underlying the differences between the sexes, along with an appreciation for what they mean in society and culture.

“There are all sorts of forms of sexual diversity in animals that I think are sort of inspiring,” she says. “They also make us think more about gender roles in humans. In many societies, those roles are quite strict, but they’re changing.”

Mank’s work to better understand the genetic causes and evolutionary consequences of differences between the sexes could have implications for animal conservation, human health and drug development, and more. Students and postdoctoral researchers from her lab have gone on to work in academia as well as in industry, as data scientists and genomics experts in biotechnology companies.

Mank recently cemented Canada as her new home base; in a summertime Zoom ceremony she attended from her garden, she became a citizen.

Shireen Hassim: ‘You have to understand how race, gender and class are intersecting inequalities’

Hassim, a South African expert in feminist theory, politics and social movements, also travelled across the world to become a C150. She was recruited by Carleton University to help grow the unique Institute of African Studies. The university is the only one in Canada with a postgraduate program in African studies.

“It seemed like a real opportunity to craft a program that would have an impact more broadly, both in Canada and Africa,” Hassim says. “So that was exciting.”

Hassim’s early research focused on gender and politics in Africa.

“We can’t assume that national liberation will automatically mean that women will benefit,” says Hassim.

Her background gives her knowledge depth and breadth for teaching students about societal inequalities more broadly. 

“If you’re interested in why certain kinds of hierarchies, even between nations, persist, you have to understand how race, gender and class are intersecting inequalities,” she says.

The role of a program like Carleton’s, she says, is to train a new generation to understand other countries and other parts of the world in depth.

“When a trading opportunity or a conflict arises, will we have people who know Africa,” Hassim asks, “people who can be advisors to provincial and federal governments or agencies, because they have that evidence base, that knowledge base?”

In 2020, the pandemic shutdowns closed many doors; Hassim couldn’t recruit new international students or bring over African colleagues, or send Carleton students abroad. However, she created a window of opportunity: she launched Knowing Africa, a twice-monthly Zoom seminar that became a major international success.

“It’s centred around this idea that Africa is a place of making theory; it’s not just a space that you go and visit and extract knowledge from,” says Hassim. “It is actively engaged itself in thinking about the continent, about the world, about major social, economic, political problems.”

The series has successfully built a network of big thinkers, who continue to meet online because it allows for broader participation from scholars in Africa.

In another victory for Hassim’s institution-building agenda, Carleton has expanded its master’s program in African studies to become a collaborative PhD program. Hassim wants it to continue to grow.

“That’s where we’re going to produce the really deep knowledge,” she says.

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Keywords

• Sex and gender studies
• Social neuroendocrinology
• Sexual configurations theory
• Gender inequity
• Evolutionary genomics
• Feminist theory
• Sexuality
• Gender/Sex diversity