In addition to the 11 significant female-biased pathways, we identified two male-biased pathways with borderline significance: pathways related to programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1), programmed cell death-ligand1 (PD-L1) cancer immunotherapy (z-score = − 0.82, -log(p) = 2.01) and p53 signaling (z-score = − 0.45, -log(p) = 1.64). This evidence concerns the gene CD274 and cancer.