You raise an excellent point.
The answer to the first part of your question is, yes, we're multidisciplinary. The institute of gender and health takes a bio-psychosocial approach to everything including animal research where, actually, the research assistant's sex can influence the way the animals respond to pain. There's even literature out there saying that animals have gender, which is fascinating but not the topic today.
Whether we're working with universities and social scientists to look at how the questions are asked, I'd say half our researchers are social scientists. I'm thinking particularly of Greta Bauer and Elizabeth Saewyc, who are particularly looking at the questions around gender, gender identity, and what came out of the transgender youth survey.
I don't know if you all responded to the census, but I wrote my own comment, and I'm sure you saw not just to tick off male and female, which is particularly relevant to the bill tabled today. We're suggesting probably a two-step approach, for instance, about the sex that you were assigned at birth versus what gender you currently identify with.
The second part of your question regards systemic bias in questionnaires. Many of the depression questionnaires that are used ask, “Are you crying more often?” Well, men, aren't going to answer that. Men actually have a lot more physical symptoms. They may feel more anger and be more irritable, so there is bias in the data collection methods, absolutely.
Our second course, called sex and gender in primary data collection with humans, addresses those issues that you very wisely raised.