Gender medicine is the topic of this issue of The Biochemist. In 2014, Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Janine Clayton, Director of the Office of Research on Women's Health (ORWH) at NIH, announced that NIH would begin requiring all preclinical grant proposals to address sex as a biological variable1. The ORWH was set up in 1990 with the specific mandate to promote the inclusion of women and minority individuals in all clinical trials going forward2. Similar guidelines are imposed by the European Commission and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.