Sex and Gender Bias in Technology and Artificial Intelligence–Chapter 4: Big Data in healthcare from a sex and gender perspective

Big Data is revolutionizing biomedical research and healthcare. It provides a wealth of information that is useful for increasing our understanding of disease trajectories, facilitating medical decisions, and delivering healthcare to patients in a more accurate way, which is aligned with the Precision Medicine approach. This chapter provides an overview of the literature on Big Data Health and Sex & Gender as well as current initiatives involved with science, policy-making, and education in relation with this field including Data2x, Women's Health Initiative (WHI), Foundation's Big Data for Breast Cancer (BD4BC), Society for Women's Health Research (SWHR), Women in Global Health (WGH), and Women in Big Data. We outline the main challenges associated with data, process, and management of Big Data to healthcare and wellbeing, from a sex and gender perspective, and we highlight the opportunities. Furthermore, we discuss the notion of fairness in the context of both data and algorithms. Finally, we point out solutions to overcome undesirable sex and gender biases in Big Data for biomedicine and healthcare.