Sex is a biological property of an organism, whereas gender is a social construct.
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Problem is "sex" is an ambiguous word with multiple meanings and "gender" has been redefined to be useless. We probably need a new word that specifically refers to this one usage of "sex"
Scientific usage of many words often is very specific and unambiguous to scientists regardless of a vague or shifting common usage. Unless you’re publishing papers that have to do with such things, you’re not included in “we” and scientific usage will mostly ignore common usage.
Science does not need to adopt a whole new language because the rest of popular culture is ambiguous.
It's not remotely ambiguous?
It has two meanings, the biological sex of an organism and the biological reproduction of that organism.
You just provided the example of how its ambiguous. It makes titles confusing when you don't know exactly which meaning is meant. While using "gender" in the title would have been clearer, especially as mice don't have social constructs that we associate with the term.
In this context, "experimenters' sex" can only reasonably mean whether the experimenter was female or male.
The other alternative would have been them doing some experimental fucking next to the mice to see what happens. Such a paper would undoubtedly have been titled differently.
So… what does happen? Surely someone has already done that experiment.
It's not though. Literally at all.
"Experimenters' (possessive) sex" : so, their biological sex is the only thing they can posses in this sentence. They can't "possess" sexual reproduction in this context, that would not make any sense. This is just simple grammar.
Gender would also make zero sense because this is not an article about gender.
I can understand the confusion if English isn't your first language but outside of that it's very clear.
ambiguous
2: capable of being understood in two or more possible senses or ways
The word "senses" from your definition can be understood multiple ways. Yet, the meaning is absolutely clear from the context, just as the word sex is in the article. You are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
"capable"
Thanks to grammar, we are literally incapable of understanding "sex" in this context to mean anything other than biological sex. I can't believe I'm having to explain this multiple times.
The only argument people are making is that they lack the reading comprehension to understand the sentence correctly.
Isn't the common use of the word "sex" just short for "sexual intercourse"?
And unless there's the possibility that people are fucking in front of the mice, there's no ambiguity here.