It Takes Two to Tango: Including a Female Perspective in Reproductive Biology

Abstract

Like many scientific disciplines, the field of reproductive biology is subject to biases in terminology and research foci. For example, females are often described as the coy and passive players in reproductive behaviors and are termed ‘promiscuous’ if they engage in extra-pair copulations. Males on the other hand are viewed as actively holding territories and fighting with other males. Males are termed ‘multiply mating’ if they mate with multiple females. Similarly, textbooks often illustrate meiosis as it occurs in males but not females. This edition of ICB includes a series of papers that focus on reproduction from the female perspective. These papers were a subset of the work presented in our symposium and complimentary sessions on female reproductive biology. In this manuscript, we use a question and answer format to leverage the diverse perspectives and voices involved with the symposium in an exploration of theoretical, cultural, pedagogical, and scientific issues related to the study of female biology. We hope this dialog will provide a stepping-stone toward moving reproductive science and teaching to a more gender-neutral and objective framework.

An inconvenient tooth: Evaluating female choice in multiple paternity using an evolutionarily and ecologically important vertebrate clade

“…Traditional explanations have centred around convenience polyandry, including the dogma of “promiscuous” males competing for fitness while females are “choosy” (at best), where more often females are portrayed as passive players in a male–male competitive framework. With the relatively recent emergence of feminist perspectives in ecological fields (Gowaty, 2003; Hrdy, 1986, 1999; Orr et al, 2020), alternative mechanisms and evolutionary theories for the widespread occurrence of multiple paternity across vertebrate lineages are gaining traction (Eberhard, 1996; Tregenza & Wedell, 2000; Zeh & Zeh, 1996, 1997, 2001). These alternative hypotheses position females as more active stakeholders in determining sireship within a reproductive event or cycle, especially when resources are exclusively maternally derived.…”

Pearl lecture: Biological normalcy: A new framework for biocultural analysis of human population variation

“…In a review of 14 major journals reporting NIH‐funded clinical trials, only one ( Journal of the American College of Cardiology ) had guidelines for reporting sex/gender differences (Geller et al, 2018). Although the focus here is on NIH‐sponsored biomedical research, such issues are front and center in evolutionary biology (see Orr et al, 2020 for comments on sex bias in reproductive biology).…”

“…If, for example, the symptoms of heart attacks are different in women than men (as they are now known to be), the failure of clinicians to diagnose a heart attack can lead to higher mortality among women (Maas et al, 2011). Excluding reproductive‐age or pregnant or nursing women as research participants due to perceived vulnerability (abnormality), or biological complexity and dynamism over the reproductive life course can have substantial impacts on fitness (Orr et al, 2020).…”

Female reproductive fluid composition differs based on mating system in Peromyscus mice

“…Consequently, female reproductive traits that enable post-copulatory control and selective fertilization of ova are predicted to occur in polyandrous – but not monogamous – species. This prediction has been poorly tested, however, likely due to lack of attention to female reproductive traits compared to male reproductive traits in post-copulatory sexual selection studies (Orr et al 2020), the technical challenges of examining covert mechanisms of ‘cryptic female choice’ for internally fertilizing species (reviewed in Firman et al 2017; Ng et al 2018), and the difficulty of disentangling these female mechanisms from sperm competition and sexual conflict (Simmons and Wedell 2020).…”