Table 3.
Authors’ checklist for gender-sensitive reporting
| Research approaches | |
| ✓ Are the concepts of gender and/or sex used in your research project? | |
| ✓ If yes, have you explicitly defined the concepts of gender and/or sex? Is it clear what aspects of gender and/or sex are being examined in your study? | |
| ✓ If no, do you consider this to be a significant limitation? Given existing knowledge in the relevant literature, are there plausible gender and/or sex factors that should have been considered? If you consider sex and/or gender to be highly relevant to your proposed research, the research design should reflect this. | |
| Research questions and hypotheses | |
| ✓ Does your research question(s) or hypothesis/es make reference to gender and/or sex, or relevant groups or phenomena (e.g., differences between males and females, differences among women, seeking to understand a gendered phenomenon such as masculinity)? | |
| Literature review | |
| ✓ Does your literature review cite prior studies that support the existence (or lack) of significant differences between women and men, boys and girls, or males and females? | |
| ✓ Does your literature review point to the extent to which past research has taken gender or sex into account? | |
| Research methods | |
| ✓ Is your sample appropriate to capture gender and/or sex-based factors? | |
| ✓ Is it possible to collect data that are disaggregated by sex and/or gender? | |
| ✓ Are the inclusion and exclusion criteria well justified with respect to sex and/or gender? (Note: this pertains to human and animal subjects and biological systems that are not whole organisms) | |
| ✓ Is the data collection method proposed in your study appropriate for investigation of sex and/or gender? | |
| ✓ Is your analytic approach appropriate and rigorous enough to capture gender and/or sex-based factors? | |
| Ethics | |
| ✓ Does your study design account for the relevant ethical issues that might have particular significance with respect to gender and/or sex? (e.g., inclusion of pregnant women in clinical trials) |
Source: Adapted from Canadian Institutes of Health Research (2016) [53]