Person:

Marsella, Jamie

The sex disparity in COVID-19 mortality varies widely and is of uncertain origin. In their recent Nature paper “Sex differences in immune responses that underlie COVID-19 disease outcomes," Takahashi et al. assess immune phenotype in a sample of COVID-19 patients and conclude that the “immune landscape in COVID-19 patients is considerably different between the sexes,” warranting different vaccine and therapeutic regimes for men and women -- a claim widely disseminated following the publication. Here, we argue that these inferences are not supported by their findings: this study does not demonstrate that biological sex explains COVID-19 outcomes among patients. This study is diagnostic of an ongoing pattern in sex difference research of overstatement of findings and superficial treatment of factors beyond innate sex in analyzing the causes of gender/sex disparities in health outcomes.

This essay introduces the term investment feminism to characterize the phenomenon in which financial actors position investment as a powerful lever for advancing gender equity. We offer investment feminism as an analytic tool that illuminates patterns and relations incompletely revealed by existing concepts such as commodity feminism and neoliberal feminism. We develop the concept of investment feminism through a close analysis of its role in the femtech industry, which markets technology and products to promote women's health. Drawing on industry reports, press coverage, and marketing materials, we describe how venture capital firms and femtech startups proffer financial investment as a high-impact means of feminist political action. We argue that while technology has the potential to yield services, tools, diagnostics, and therapies that benefit women, the technological solutions promoted by investment feminism within the women’s health space favor individual self-maintenance rather than structural change. We offer the concept of investment feminism as an analytic tool to support feminist scholars and activists in attending to the role of the financial sector and its ever-increasing influence on gender relations and feminist movements.