The word “gender” comes from a Latin root involving “birth” and shows up in English in such verbs as “engender” which literally means “to beget offspring” (and idiomatically means “to cause”).

If you were person speaking English before about 2000 or so, maybe a bit later, and you were neither a gender studies researcher or in touch with that discipline directly, the words would literally both mean the same thing and basically it’d be a question of which the scientific field in question used more.