Tag Archives: gender

At 5 Years: Great Blog Posts That (Almost) Nobody Read

By | September 12, 2019

We announced last week that The Medical Care Blog has reached its 5-year milestone. As part of the editorial team, I’m excited to pause briefly and reflect on some great blog posts about healthcare that I think deserve to have been more widely read. Contributions from our authors have helped us reach more than 80,000… Read More »

The Desire to Avoid Pregnancy Scale: A new way to measure pregnancy preferences

Why do we care about unintended pregnancies? Rates of unintended pregnancy “indicate the extent to which women and couples can determine freely whether and when they have children,” as stated by Finer and Zolna. There is some evidence that women and girls who have unintended pregnancies have a higher likelihood of other risk factors, such as… Read More »

The Intersection of Religion, Female Empowerment, and Access to Reproductive Healthcare

By | June 20, 2017

Reproductive rights have been a topic for policy making and legal jurisprudence throughout much of the past century. As the healthcare system of the United States continues to evolve, women’s health and reproductive rights remain central to the debate. A recent policy update by Aishwarya Rajagopalan and Lisa Lines here at The Medical Care Blog discusses… Read More »

Intimate Partner Violence: The Under-Addressed Pandemic

By | March 21, 2017

Violence against women and girls is an international concern that cuts across all sectors of society. The United Nations defines violence against women as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary… Read More »

Should Women Rush to Get IUDs Post-Election? They Should’ve Been Rushing all Along!

The unintended pregnancy rate (reflecting pregnancies that are unwanted or mistimed) for women in the U.S. has hovered at around 50% for the last 35 years.  Only recently has that rate dropped to 45%, but the burden continues to fall most heavily on poor, undereducated women, women from racial or ethnic minority backgrounds, and young women.  Much talk… Read More »

The childhood roots of health inequity: Part 1 – Dr. Paula Braveman

By | November 28, 2016

Children who grow up in stressful environments, without adequate adult support, are at much greater risk of developing heart disease, cancer, and many other diseases as adults. This is partly because of the coping behaviors that people use to deal with stress, but also because of the cumulative effects of toxic stress. Thus, many of… Read More »

The intersection of physician gender and quality of care

By | June 14, 2016

According to data out this month from the Kaiser Family Foundation, there are 2 male doctors for every 1 female in practice in the US. This translates to about 300,000 fewer women than men in practice today. This gender difference is a disparity that many in health care may think has resolved, but in fact… Read More »