The mission of the Maney Lab is to promote rigor, reproducibility, and replicability in the analysis of sex-based data.
Rethinking Sex Differences in Biomedicine
Listen to an interview with Dr. Maney on the podcast "Impact in Progress."
Moving past sex categories to evaluate symptoms in individuals, regardless of sex, is ultimately more precise than sex-based care.
Our in-depth analysis of articles in the brain and behavioral sciences shows that "sex-specific" findings often aren't. See Emory's press release.
"Among 200 recent studies in the behavioral and brain sciences claiming a sex- or gender-dependent effect in the title, fewer than one quarter presented statistical evidence consistent with that claim."
Binary Labels, Binary Stories...
The companion paper to my Bern Lecture at SICB 2025 is out in Integrative & Comparative Biology.
"Our work with the sparrows shows how progress can be made by moving beyond sex categories... Such approaches do not deny gamete-based sex; rather, they decouple that binary from traits that do not share its structure."
Developmental and Dynamic Systems
Check out this article in a Special Issue of Biology of Sex Differences on "Eschewing the Binary."
"By adopting frameworks that allow us to describe how complex systems work, we can capture the richness of behaviors, attitudes, preferences, and attributions that characterize sex/gender entanglement and sex/gender-related variation."
A Problem of Knots and Buckets
Check out this article in a Special Issue of Biology of Sex Differences on "Eschewing the Binary."
"We argue that attempting to draw a distinction between sex and gender can reignite the nature/nurture debate, inadvertently bringing outdated metaphors and assumptions about innateness and causation into our research."
Operationalization, Measurement, and
Interpretation of Sex/Gender
Transcending Binaries and Accounting for Context and Entanglement
What happens when you lock behavioral neuroendocrinologists and neurofeminists in a room for a week in Frankfurt? This book happens!
The Bird that Broke the Binary
This article in Scientific American combines my research programs on sparrows and sex/gender.
"Every newly evolved avenue to develop into a sexed body begins a new, generative process that gives rise to still newer routes... it is clear that sexual diversity within species is an evolutionary adaptation—a feature, not a bug."
Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, Annual Conference 2025
What a thrill getting the lab back together (plus a few guest stars) for the Howard Bern lecture and TWO special symposia at the SICB annual meeting!
Special Issue: Sex/gender diversity
Kathleen Casto and I co-edited a special issue of Hormones and Behavior called "Sex/gender Diversity and Behavioral Neuroendocrinology in the 21st Century."
Sex contextualism in laboratory research
In a Focus Issue of Cell, we discuss how to analyze and interpret sex-related variation while upholding the highest standards of rigor. Read the explainer here.
Training materials on how to consider sex and gender: Are they up to the task?
We evaluated publicly available online courses on how to incorporate sex and gender as a variable in research, including materials from NIH and CIHR. We found that there is room for improvement.
Best Practices to Promote Rigor and Reproducibility in the Era of Sex-inclusive Research
Janet Rich-Edwards and I use the "4 C's" framework to discuss how to best test for and report sex variability.
Dr. Maney heads to Harvard as a Radcliffe Fellow
I'm thrilled to have had the opportunity to spend a full academic year 2023-2024 collaborating with colleagues at Harvard. I worked with them on resources to help researchers focus less on "sex" as a variable and more on the variables that are actually informative and causal.
Identifying Barriers to Implementation of SABV policy
With my collaborators Katrina Karkazis and Kimbi Hagen, I examined the implementation of the NIH policy on Sex as a Biological Variable (SABV). This project was funded by the Emory Specialized Center for Research Excellence on Sex Differences.
Why and How to Account for Sex and Gender in Behavioral Research
Lise Eliot led this how-to article, based on our workshop at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in 2022.
Sex-Inclusive Biomedicine: Are New Policies Increasing Rigor and Reproducibility?
My collaborator Janet Rich-Edwards and I weigh in on common analytical errors in the study of sex variability and what we can do to prevent them.
Rigor and Reproducibility in the Study of Sex Differences
Click to watch my presentation at the UCLA Lab of Neuroendocrinology.
University of California, Los Angeles
March 17, 2023
Click to watch my keynote address at the Connors-BRI Symposium: Incorporating Sex and Gender as Research Variables to Advance Health.
Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School
May 9, 2022
Sex-based Data in the Spotlight
What counts as evidence for a sex difference? Our study in eLife shows that claims of sex differences in the biological sciences are often not backed by sound statistics.
SexDifference.org
We developed sexdifference.org to visualize overlap between two sexes. The tool generates graphs and calculates effect sizes. For a more general tool you can use to visualize any difference, head to effectsize.science.
