Daphna Joel was already an established neuroscientist in 2009, when she chose to launch a gender studies course at Tel Aviv University. While preparing the class curriculum, she became deeply interested in the mechanisms through which gender is formed. Her research led her to an experiment by a professor at the University of Maryland that demonstrated how characteristics of certain neurons in animal brains could change from male to female, or vice versa, when exposed to a stressor for 15 minutes.