4 Why is the female ‘problematic’ in sports science research?

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The image shows a woman on a cycle ergometer with electrodes on her chest and a mask on her face. She is completing a fitness test and being shown results by a female tester.

One of the main objectives of this course is to fill in the knowledge and communication gaps by providing athletes, coaches and trainers with the knowledge they need to support the design and delivery of safe and effective programmes for female athletes. Ideally, with this added knowledge coaches and trainers will feel more confident and less embarrassed to have conversations with female athletes around subjects such as menstruation, breast support and pelvic floor health.

In Activity 4, Dr Emma Ross explains more about why females may be a ‘complication’ to researchers and the impact it can have.

Activity 4 Good excuses for not using females in research

Timing: Allow about 10 minutes

Watch the video below where Dr Emma Ross explains why researchers may leave females subjects out of their research. Then answer the following:

• Explain why researching female athletes can make research more time consuming and expensive.

Download this video clip.Video player: boc_sfps_1_session1_activity3.mp4

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Transcript

EMMA ROSS

There’s some really good excuses for not using females in research studies. So for example the menstrual cycle. To account for that, you have to make sure that you’re testing all the females in your study at the same time of the menstrual cycle. Now contrary to popular belief, women don’t sync menstrual cycles however much time they spend together.

So that’s really difficult and it means your experiment takes more time. If you’re really going to understand the female’s response to your study, your intervention, then you would need to look at her across different time points of the menstrual cycle when her hormones are at significantly different levels. And of course that means collecting more data and so it takes more time and that adds more cost.

And again, the menstrual cycle proves challenging because if you’re really going to investigate it properly, you need to measure the levels of the hormones as they fluctuate across the cycle. And that involves biochemistry, and that analysis is expensive. So it’s a good excuse, it takes more time and it costs more.

But it’s not a good enough excuse, because otherwise if we just stick to those rules we’re never going to find out enough about women. And the other thing is that we know that women don’t participate as much in research, they don’t come forward as much. So we need to do better at encouraging women into research studies. And then we need to do a better job of including them in our research design and our research funding, so that the outcomes are really useful for the coaches and athletes.

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Discussion

There are additional things that you need to do when effectively researching female athletes. Because the females’ hormones impact on their physiology you need to test them at different stages of their menstrual cycle. Collecting more data increases the time and cost of the study. In addition, you will need to take blood samples to measure hormone levels which again increases cost but also requires specific expertise.

While research with female subjects may have more variables, it is also incredibly important that we understand more about how these factors impact on active females. This is the only way that we can start to effectively understand female athletes and become able to support their needs properly.