Social Science Research on Gender and Reproduction

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

General Audience Summary This research project will examine the historical and contemporary processes through which men have come to be overlooked in the realm of reproduction with regards to biomedical knowledge. Very recently, medical researchers have been making headlines with a surprising series of findings about how men's age, health, and behavior at the time of conception affect reproductive outcomes, including miscarriage, birth defects, and children's health. The recent emergence of basic information about men's reproductive bodies reveals a profound gap in biomedical knowledge that stands in sharp contrast to the enormous efforts made to understand women's reproductive bodies over the past two centuries. This gap is especially puzzling in that the male body was the standard for research up to and including the 1990s; during this period, most medical research was conducted with samples of middle-aged, white men on the assumption that the results would generalize to the rest of the population. This project will not only examine how this gap in knowledge came about, it will also explore the social, clinical, and policy consequences that resulted from the gap. The results of this research result will eventually be made available in a book published with an academic press, in articles published in sociology journals, by way of lectures at social scientific conferences, and by promoting increased public awareness of these issues through media interviews and op-eds. The investigator will also publish journal articles and commentaries in medical and public health journals, give talks at medical conferences, and work with public health scholars to craft messages for public health campaigns. Technical Summary The investigator will build on social scientific research on gender, medicine, and reproduction to address her primary research question, which is: How do biological, cultural, and organizational processes interact in the production, dissemination, and reception of biomedical knowledge about men and reproductive health issues? She will answer it in three stages. First, she will examine the production of biomedical knowledge by analyzing historical and contemporary medical documents and by conducting interviews with researchers and clinicians. Next, she will examine whether and how such knowledge is disseminated to the public by conducting a content analysis of reports published by federal health agencies, medical organizations, and the media. Finally, she will examine the reception of biomedical knowledge by conducting interviews with approximately one-hundred men to analyze how they think about their role in reproduction, as well as how they respond to emerging biomedical knowledge about how men's age, health, and behavior affects children's health. The project will contribute to social scientific debates about how biological and social processes coalesce to influence both medical knowledge and individual experiences of reproduction. It will make theoretical and empirical contributions to sociological, anthropological, and historical literature on reproduction and gender, motherhood and fatherhood, bodies and embodiment, knowledge, health and medicine. It will also generate an analytic framework for examining how particular biological processes, such as those associated with reproduction, come together with particular social processes, such as specific cultural norms and organizational infrastructures, to produce gaps in biomedical knowledge.