Cancer referrals have been missed and previous convictions overlooked because biological sex has been erased from official data on health, crime and education, a review has found.
The review, commissioned by the last Conservative government and released on Wednesday, found that the word “gender” started to replace “sex” in the collection of data in the 1990s and that for the past ten years “robust and accurate data on biological sex” has been lost.
The study, led by Professor Alice Sullivan from University College London, investigated all public bodies and found “the meaning of sex is no longer stable in administrative or major survey data”.
Sullivan’s review found inconsistencies in the way sex and gender were recorded and conflated. Some official surveys were found to remove
