A handful of immunologists are pushing the field to take attributes such as sex chromosomes, sex hormones, and reproductive tissues into account.

Sabra Klein is deeply aware that sex matters. During her PhD research at Johns Hopkins University, Klein learned how sex hormones can influence the brain and behavior. “I naively thought: Everybody knows hormones can affect lots of physiological processes—our metabolism, our heart, our bone density. It must be affecting the immune system,” she says.

But when she graduated in 1998, she struggled to convince others that sex differences in the immune system were a worthy topic for her postdoctoral research. “I wasn’t able to find a microbiologist or an immunologist who was going to let me study sex differences,” she says.

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