Does gender make you sick? Understanding and improving health from a comprehensive gender perspective.

Everyone has the right to a chance of a long life in good health, no matter whether they are a man or a woman, rich or poor. However, globally men (in both rich and poor countries) experience a higher burden of disease and have lower life expectancy than women. Much of this difference is due to men's risk-taking behaviours: they drink more alcohol, smoke more tobacco and drive more dangerously than women do. Some of this is driven by gender - i.e. the social rules and norms that tell each and every one of us what is appropriate behavior for men and women in all societies.

Much of the current research on gender and health focuses mainly on women and girls and their health-related risks. We believe it is very important to understand and address the issues that globally place men more at risk of illness, disability and early death. This is important not only for the health of men, but also for women's health too - for example, there is increasing evidence that young women in many countries are now beginning to drink and smoke at similar rates to their male peers. There is also evidence that men's risk-taking impacts negatively on women's health and wellbeing.

We plan to establish and strengthen a network of researchers, practitioners and health advocates, who are engaged with studying and acting to improve the health of both men and women around the world through a better understanding of gender and health issues. Over a period of 3 years, researchers and campaigners in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Americas and Europe will come together to deliberate and identify solutions to improve the health of populations in different parts of the world. These ideas will be shared and debated with both policy makers and the communities of men and women whose health outcomes we are hoping to improve.

Seminars will be open to a wide variety of participants, and at least half the time the seminars will be web-based and hence available to all. We will communicate the outputs from the seminars through websites and social media, and hope that in doing so we can raise awareness that gender affects the behaviours, risks, and health of everyone, not just women and girls.

This proposed activities will benefit a wide range of stakeholders - both as immediate and potential future beneficiaries. Immediate beneficiaries will include collaborators in the proposed new network of researchers, and advocates with an interest in gender, health and masculinities. In addition, participants in the seminars held in each country will benefit from the opportunity to discuss and share ideas about gender and health and identify common problems and solutions.

Additional beneficiaries from each seminar will include those who access the seminar series through the web. Seminars will either be held as webinars, in which case seminar participation is available to all web-users. In addition, we will upload seminar highlights (e.g. presentations, podcasts and vod-casts) post-hoc - again making the seminars available to all web-users. The webinars and all web-based activity will be administered through UCL.

Potential future beneficiaries of this seminar series will include those in decision-making positions who are concerned with priority-setting and resource allocation in health programmes nationally, regionally and globally. Seminar outputs will include policy briefs and research summaries, and these will be disseminated locally to key decision-makers identified through the networks of our proposed collaborators. It is hoped that these outputs will increase the capacity of health decision-makers to make evidence-informed decisions about how best to address issues of gender, health and masculinities. Where evidence is lacking, the network will use its linkages and communication skills to advocate for increased research funding and evidence-gathering.

The proposed new network and seminars will benefit other emerging processes in global health research and policy. For example, through our close links to multilateral institutions (such as WHO and UNFPA) we expect the seminars and their outputs to be of great benefit as they develop their future gender and health strategies.

This proposal has been developed with a range of inputs from both academic and civil society partners, and engagement with civil society will be crucial to ensuring that evidence-informed decisions around gender, health and masculinities are in place in the future. We expect the seminars will be of great interest to a wide variety of civil society organisations working in the fields of health, gender and development. The proposed outputs from the seminars will be useful as advocacy tools. In addition, we expect that future research proposals will be developed as collaborative activities between academic partners and civil society partners. These proposals will specifically include more junior members of staff from collaborating institutions in order to build future capacity in this area.

We will measure the impact of the seminar series through a variety of monitoring indicators, including, but not limited to:
1. Number of collaborative institutions and individuals who participate in the new network focused on gender and health
2. Rates of participation in seminars - both physical attendance, and participation in webinars
3. Sign-up rates to receive email invitations to web and other events hosted by the network
4. Number of times that web-based videos and presentations are viewed and downloaded after events
5. Number of collaborative research proposals submitted by network members
6. Participation of junior colleagues in the development of research proposals.