The NIH Policy on Sex as a Biological Variable (SABV) articulates NIH’s expectation that sex, as a biological variable, will be factored into research designs, analyses, and reporting in vertebrate animal and human studies.
NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) offers training modules, videos, and other tools to instruct biomedical researchers on properly accounting for sex as a biological variable. Learn more about the NIH Policy on Sex as a Biological Variable.
Go to the E-Learning section of the ORWH website for courses that provide a thorough and up-to-date understanding of sex and gender influences on health and disease as well as NIH requirements on factoring sex as a biological variable into research designs.
Offered Courses
Sex as a Biological Variable: A Primer: This course consists of four independent, interactive modules designed to help the research community—including trainees and researchers at all career stages, NIH grant applicants, and those engaged in peer review—account for and appropriately integrate SABV across all phases of biomedical and biobehavioral research.
- Module 1: SABV and the Health of Women and Men
- Module 2: SABV and Experimental Design
- Module 3: SABV and Analyses
- Module 4: SABV and Research Reporting
SABV Primer Supplement: These supplemental videos introduce SABV and NIH’s SABV policy, summarize the e-learning course and its four modules, and provide examples of stakeholders who incorporate SABV in their research.
SABV Primer: Train the Trainer: This course provides researchers and trainers within the biomedical research community the tools to account for and expertly teach how to apply the NIH Policy on SABV in research and grant application writing. The course has six independent, interactive modules that cover a range of training settings, including in-person training, virtual training, and one-on-one training.