Beyond Demographics: Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Oral Health Research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sex, gender, and sexuality are crucial and interrelated factors influencing oral health outcomes, yet they are often overlooked and inadequately addressed in human studies on oral health. Biological sex influences oral disease susceptibility through hormonal, immunological, and microbiome-related mechanisms. Concomitantly, gender as a social construct modulates health through psychosocial stress, health care access, and societal norms. Sexuality intersects with oral health through behavioral risks, stigma, and discrimination, especially among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning populations. Despite their importance, oral health research often treats sex as a binary demographic variable, excluding sexual and gender minority individuals. There is a lack of meaningful integration of these variables across all phases of research, from proposal development and data collection to analysis and knowledge creation. This results in limited generalizability, perpetuates health inequities, and impedes the development of inclusive, evidence-based, and person-centered interventions. Furthermore, dental education and research training programs often lack comprehensive content on sex, gender, and sexuality, contributing to research approaches and training that reinforce binary-centered investigations. Substantial gaps in mentorship, representation, and inclusive curricula largely contribute to the underrepresentation of gender-diverse scholars and leaders in oral health. To address these gaps, a multipronged action plan is necessary, including an inclusive research design, robust data collection tools, curriculum reform that integrates person-centered frameworks, community engagement and service-learning, policy change, and accountability mechanisms. The integration of intersectionality, pertinent sex, gender, sexuality, and social determinants of health in oral health research and education is essential for achieving scientific rigor, health equity, and culturally responsive care for all populations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.143 | 0.172 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".