City v-c backs Sullivan Review on gender question in research

A vice-chancellor has criticised the “quiet disappearance” of sex as a recorded variable from academic research, comparing recent pressure to drop “politically uncomfortable” classifications with Stalin’s persecution of statisticians in Soviet-era Russia.

Speaking at an event at City St George’s, University of London to discuss last year’s Sullivan Review, which called for research to use biological sex as the default position in data questions, the institution’s head Anthony Finkelstein said it was vital that researchers continued to use established categories for sex in their statistical work.

“In recent years, there’s been growing unease about recording sex as a basic variable, and pressure – sometimes explicit and sometimes ambient – to replace it with or collapse it into gender identity,” observed Finkelstein.

Yet “biological sex” was a category that was important to maintain, he said. “It matters because sex correlates strongly with capital, health, mortality, fertility, violence, incarceration, employment, caring responsibilities,” explained Finkelstein.

“Remove it, blur it or replace it, and whole domains of policy analysis become weaker and less reliable,” he added.

That did not mean studies should not also focus on gender identity, said Finkelstein, a software engineer who was previously chief adviser on national security to the UK government before joining City St George’s in 2021.

“Gender identity may be an important subject study, but it’s a different kind of variable. It’s subjective, fluid and not comparable across time in the way that a census requires,” he said.

“It belongs properly in specialist surveys and research instruments but not as a substitute for a foundational demographic category,” he added, noting that this “is not an argument about dignity or recognition”.

Speaking on 12 February on a panel alongside Alice Sullivan, the UCL sociology professor who authored the government-commissioned review on how sex and gender are captured in publicly funded research, Finkelstein said he had grave concerns over the report’s findings – including “the barriers to research [and] institutional caution” related to collecting data on sex.

The report was recently criticised as contributing to “anti-trans discourse” and linked to attempts to remove trans and gender-diverse people from public life.

But Finkelstein, the first UK vice-chancellor to speak publicly about the Sullivan Review’s findings since it was published in March 2025, noted the “quiet disappearance of sex as a recorded variable, not because it lacks relevance, because it’s become politically uncomfortable. It’s a familiar pattern,” he said.

Drawing parallels with the Soviet Union’s infamous 1937 census – which discovered that its population was 7 million lower than expected, primarily because of purges and famine, leading to the imprisonment and execution of its primary statistician Ivan Kraval – Finkelstein argued that accurate data was vital for holding power to account and statisticians should not kowtow to political or social pressure.

“We don’t live in a system that executes mathematicians…but we do live in systems that reward conformity, discourage awkward questions and quietly reshape categories so that certain answers no longer appear,” he said.

“There is a long-term danger of governing the degraded data and discovering too late that we are not describing the world we inhabit…Society that can’t better count itself will eventually lose itself and its ability to govern itself.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com