Scientific literature provides evidence that male gender is a risk factor for psychosis.
(Radua et al., 2017). However, it is quite common for clinical studies to have an overrepresentation of women compared to men, perhaps because women's characteristic
way of expressing distress aligns more closely with the criteria for accessing mental
health services (Rietdijk et al., 2011). This imbalance in research is problematic not
only because it presents a distorted representation of reality, but also because it
contradicts epidemiological data on psychosis and fails to identify male individuals,
who are those at higher risk. Furthermore, it is known that the prevalence of clinical
high-risk of psychosis is higher in studies whose sample is predominantly female, and
this is most likely because in these samples there could be more false positives, given
the fact that the rate of transition to psychosis is higher in men (Salazar de Pablo et al.,
2021). To address this issue, we present the findings of a study examining the role of
gender and its implications when detecting high risk of psychosis. The objective of the
present study is to analyze the gender profile in a clinical sample of adolescents and
young adults from a day hospital. Participants will complete the Spanish version of the
Prodromal Questionnaire - Brief version (PQ-B, Fonseca-Pedrero et al., 2021) as a
measure of psychometric high-risk of psychosis. Based on these results, possible
recruitment strategies aimed at compensating for this lack of gender balance will be
discussed, as well as necessary mechanisms for controlling the gender variable in
research in this field.