First of all, thank you. I think success is all relative, but I'm glad to take that one home.
To start with the latter, in terms of the consideration of sex being easier, it's because we can get sex-disaggregated data on almost anything. It's not always reported that way, and if it's a new and emerging issue sometimes we have to do a little digging or generate new research, but relatively speaking, we can usually tell males from females. I'll spare you the commentary on the fact that even that is not completely binary.
For gender, it is much more nuanced. That's where the plus comes in. It's about context and roles and relationships. That just takes much more of a finer touch. I think we still have a ways to go there. We've been able to tackle it in some files but not in others.
Why sex and gender? Frankly, I think it was a couple of things. One was that as a science department with a science portfolio, it was really important—critical, obviously—for us to get the science right, because that has tremendous impact, as Dr. Tannenbaum said, in terms of health outcomes and impacts. So there is a science to it. We were looking at it as more than a social construct. Reflecting back, looking at it as sex and gender versus gender-based analysis allowed us to produce some good marketing in terms of getting over some of the barriers with regard to resistance: “Here come those crazy feminists again.”
I mean, I grew up in the early eighties. Feminist analysis got translated into gender-based analysis, and now in the health sector we're looking at sex- and gender-based analysis. So it was really about positioning it for us, and to use it in training and marketing as an evidenced-based tool and an evidence-based process as well as a gender equality mechanism or method.