Photo Credit: Mansi Midha/Getty Images/Images of Empowerment, Udaipur, Rajasthan, India Researchers at the Center on Gender Equity and Health (GEH) at UC San Diego have been awarded a $1.7 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to conduct research on how social norms affect the health of adolescent girls and young women in [...]

UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL: September 6, 2023 at 12:01 a.m. ET CONTACT: Tiana Ware 301-233-9555 tware@thereisgroup.com Non-binary and transgender Californians suffered alarming levels of physical and sexual violence in the past year New survey shows victims suffer severe emotional impact, but most violence goes unreported WASHINGTON (September 6, 2023) – An annual survey of physical and [...]

Date: September 22, 2023  This month, the Agency for All Project Consortium received the 2022-2023 Marge Horn Award from the USAID Bureau for Global Health’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health’s Research, Technology and Utilization Division (RTU). This is an annual award honoring stand-out implementation science research, global innovators, and practitioners who advance the field [...]

Date: September 27, 2023  ECODIT, in partnership with USAID’s Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Hub (GenDev), will implement the “Gender Leadership, Equity, and Advancement for Development (LEAD) program” over the next five years.   In partnership with Iris Group, Making Cents International, and PRB, GEH will be tackling comprehensive, adaptable, intersectional, trust-based, and locally led assistance [...]

Date: September 24, 2023  Authored by Pintu Paul, PhD, Kalysha Closson, PhD, and Anita Raj, PhD, this study, published in SSM Population Health Journal, explores the link between parental involvement and the delayed marriage of adolescent girls. It investigates if parental engagement is connected to girls’ participation in marital decisions, using longitudinal survey data from [...]

Date: October 3, 2023  In the article, “Study: Violence dropped in California — but was alarmingly high for this group” by author Graph Massara, new research from GEH’s California Violence Experiences Survey (CalVEX) was used to discuss “grim rates” of violence against trans and nonbinary people, despite overall reductions in violence across California.   “I wish [...]

Date: October 15, 2023 Authored by Research Scientist Nandita Bhan of the Jindal School of Public Health and Human Development and GEH’s Assistant Professor Lotus McDougal, PhD, the commentary “Centring agency and norms to meet the health needs pregnant adolescents” is a response to the systematic review, “The forgotten girls: the state of evidence for [...]

Date: October 5, 2023 In October, GEH’s Dr. Rebecca Fielding-Miller received an award from The California Collaborative for Pandemic Recovery and Readiness Research (CPR³) for their research on pandemic-related burnout among socially vulnerable caregivers in California.  Their research will help to address evidence gaps in how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the health and wellbeing of [...]

The California Center for Population Research (CCPR) will host a second All-UC Demography  Conference on UCLA campus on May 16 and 17, 2024.  This event is open to all University of California faculty and graduate students as well as all researchers affiliated with UC population and poverty centers, including Berkeley Population Center, Broom Center for [...]

San Diego, July 5, 2023 -- We are thrilled to announce the appointment of Lotus McDougal, PhD, MPH and Kathryn Barker, ScD, MPH to the leadership team of the UCSD Center on Gender Equity and Health. Dr. McDougal and Dr. Barker will play key roles in shaping the center's vision, developing new streams of work, [...]

{{ vc_btn: title=English&color=danger&size=sm&align=right&link=url%3Ahttps%253A%252F%252Fgeh.ucsd.edu%252Fthe-growing-up-great-legacy-building-and-applying-evidence-to-support-and-scale-gender-transformative-sexuality-education%252F%7Ctarget%3A_blank }} Au cours des sept dernières années, le projet Bien Grandir ! a permis de promouvoir la santé sexuelle et reproductive ainsi que l’équité de genre chez les très jeunes adolescent.es à Kinshasa, en RDC. Le webinaire de fin de projet a raconté l’histoire de Bien Grandir!, et l’équipe du projet a [...]

{{ vc_btn: title=Fran%C3%A7ais&color=danger&size=sm&align=right&link=url%3Ahttps%253A%252F%252Fgehweb.ucsd.edu%252Fthe-growing-up-great-legacy-building-and-applying-evidence-to-support-and-scale-gender-transformative-sexuality-education-fr%252F%7Ctarget%3A_blank }} Over the past seven years, the Growing Up GREAT! project has worked to promote sexual and reproductive health and gender equity among very young adolescents in Kinshasa. The end-of-project webinar told the story of Growing Up GREAT!, and members across the project team reflected on and shared lessons learned from design, [...]

  The new phase will see a deepened research and policy focus on women’s agency and social norms.  The Center on Gender Equity and Health (GEH) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, are proud to announce a continued multi-year sustained partnership to improve the […]

San Diego, May 1, 2023 -- The UC San Diego Center on Gender Equity and Health (GEH) is excited to announce Rebecka Lundgren, Professor of Medicine and Katherine Hay, Distinguished Fellow and Senior Strategy Advisor, are named new Co-Directors. This advances our 10-years strong Center into a new phase of work to tackle the issues [...]

San Diego, Feb28, 2023 -- The Center on Gender Equity and Health (GEH) at the University of California, San Diego is the recipient of a grant to support research on violence affecting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) communities in California.  The Statewide Behavioral Surveillance on Asian Californians’ Experiences of Violence and Discrimination and Their Impacts [...]

The Center on Gender Equity and Health at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) is joining thousands of colleagues from around the world to learn from each other and discuss approaches to addressing the most pressing health and development issues at this year's International Social and Behavior Change Communication (SBCC) Summit. Throughout the 2022 [...]

Huilin Li, Katherine Hay, Jennifer Yore, Rebecca Levine, Anita Raj The rate of labor force participation in California is stagnant, maintaining a 13% gender gap that disadvantages women. Correspondingly, women’s unemployment rate is also higher than that seen for men in the state, having worsened for females more than for males at the start of the pandemic, though the [...]

The project, dubbed Agency for All, is the largest grant of its type to the university and will fund an international network to promote and sustain improved health and agency in low- and middle-income countries The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has funded a $38 million, five-year project led by the Center on Gender [...]

San Diego, Oct 19th, 2021 -- The University of California San Diego (UCSD) today announced the appointment of Katherine Hay as Distinguished Fellow in Gender Equity and Health and a Senior Strategy advisor to the Vice Chancellor of Health Sciences, Prof. David Brenner. Hay, currently Deputy Director of Gender Equality at the Bill & Melinda [...]

Authored by: Dr. Modupe Taiwo, Rahinatu Adamu Hussaini, Miftahu Yahaya, Nasiru Muhammad, Akeem Adesina, Save the Children Nigeria August 12, 2020 This blog originally appeared on the EMERGE Project website. The COVID-19 pandemic has severely disrupted normal life around the world and has widened gaps in gender relations and gender equality. Indeed, disasters like this [...]

Authored by: David S. Lee, Director of Prevention at RALIANCE, and Anita Raj, Director of the Center on Gender Equity and Health July 7, 2020 This blog originally appeared on RALIANCE. As professional basketball and baseball are planning to return later this month, it appeared sport disappeared from our lives due to the pandemic. All [...]

Authored by: Edwin Thomas and Anita Raj June 24, 2020 At the peak of India’s COVID-19 crisis and the subsequent lockdown, a petition was filed in Delhi’s state court requesting rehabilitative assistance, including food, medicines and rent exemption for sex workers and members of the LGBTQ community. This petition is in line with recent media [...]

Authored by: Anita Raj June 4, 2020 In December 2019, I published a commentary in the Indian Journal of Medical Research (IJMR) highlighting the advancements India has made in the reduction of marital violence in the past decade, as indicated by data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS). At the same time, the commentary [...]

Authored by: Nabamallika Dehingia This blog originally appeared on eTAG May 13, 2020 The Internet is not an equal space. The past few years have seen a rise in concerns about the disproportionate levels of abuse experienced by women in social media platforms. From the United Nations to local non-profit organizations, entities across different geographies [...]

By Anita Raj, Jay Silverman, Rebecka Lundgren, Nandita Bhan, and Meredith Pierce May 4, 2020 This blog originally appeared on Knowledge Success The rapid growth of the COVID-19 pandemic has raised global awareness of inadequacies in our public health systems across high-, middle-, and low-income nations. As health care systems are stretched to capacity dealing [...]

Authored by: Nandita Bhan and Anita Raj In recent weeks, the COVID-19 pandemic shifted its sights towards low and middle-income countries (LMICs) as case reports from India, Nigeria, and Kenya, among others, indicate. This has put the already over-burdened health systems in these contexts under unparalleled pressures. Globally, women represent a large and growing proportion [...]

Authored by: Rebecka Lundgren, Meredith Pierce, Anita Raj, and Namratha Rao This blog originally appeared on ALiGN March 23, 2020 Gender norms – the social norms that define and restrict behaviours and opportunities for individuals based on their biological sex – are increasingly recognized as key drivers maintaining gender inequalities across nations. In response, global [...]

Read more on the EMERGE project website.

Authored by: Alyssa Brodsky Over half of the world's population is eating rice as their staple crop and although it is third to corn and wheat in quantity produced, rice cultivation accounts for 50% of all methane production from crops. Rice farming techniques that decrease the methane production and increase yields can produce 30-45 times [...]

Around the world, there is a perception of caregiving as "women's work." This work is unpaid labor, but at minimum wage it would make up between nine and eleven percent of the world's GDP 1. In the third The State of the World's Fathers: Unlocking the Power of Men's Care, MenCare and Promundo look at effects inequalities [...]

While the #MeToo movement gains ground to change across industries as varied as entertainment, the military, and higher education, almost no attention has been given to sexual harassment against adolescents in school, despite clear demonstration that these types of abuses all too often start in early adolescence. The Measuring #MeToo: A National Study on Sexual [...]

Congenital syphilis (CS) is caused by a bacteria called Treponema pallidum passed from mother to child during fetal development or at birth. CS is entirely preventable through prenatal screening and treatment of an infected pregnant woman. Despite its preventability, there were 918 recorded cases of congenital syphilis in the U.S. in 2017 - a 44 percent increase [...]

Women play a critical role in a natural resources management within their household. In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), 8 out of 10 women are responsible for collecting water for their household. Women are responsible for over 70% of water-related chores and management globally. In India alone, women make up over 65% of the agricultural [...]

I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, USA, with my parents and younger brother. When I was about 14 years old, I was in the eighth grad and was attending middle school. I was focused on my studies, my friends, and singing in the school choir. My story is not too different from many very young [...]

Education benefits girls and women around the world in a myriad of ways, including increased career opportunities,1,2 better maternal child health outcomes,1,3 and delaying child marriage 4. For these reasons, education has played significant roles in deterring girl child marriage and the inequalities stemming from it (i.e. poor reproductive health and family planning, etc.)3,5. Even so, [...]

In September 2018, UC San Diego Center on Gender Equity and Health researchers, Jennifer Wagman and Eunhee Park, joined colleagues from Raising Voices Uganda, Beyond Borders Haiti, Women's Promotion Center Tanzania and International Rescue Committee Kenya for a 3-day validation workshop in Kampala, Uganda. Raising Voices - a nonprofit organization working to prevent violence against [...]

What is Tritons for Gender Equity?  Tritons for Gender Equity (T4GE) is a student organization at UC San Diego that began its work with campus communities and organizations in April of this year. T4GE is open to anyone affiliated with UC San Diego, including undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, and staff members, and [...]

Despite growing interest in improving gender equality globally, there exist only a limited number of tools to effectively assess and/or evaluate gender-responsive programming and policy change. In a report by UN Women, it was estimated that there is a lack of measures for 80% of indicators used to assess Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 Gender [...]

Sexual violence is a threat to the health and well-being of human beings globally, and in the U.S. evidence shows that it disproportionately effects women and LBTQ+ individuals 1-3. Norms and behaviors that perpetuate sexual violence in human society must be addressed. What is one way to do this? Evidence-based education at an ideal intervention [...]

Globally, over 214 million in low-income countries who want to delay or limit their pregnancies report not using and effective contraceptive method 1. This unmet need contributes to poor reproductive health outcomes for mother and child including high rates of maternal mortality 2. Male partner objection to or interference with contraceptive methods is one of [...]

Addressing Reproductive Coercion in HEalth Settings (ARCHES) is a clinical-based intervention designed by Dr. Jay Silverman and Dr. Elizabeth Miller to increase women's ability to make decisions around their own family planning use and pregnancies.1 Previous research from Dr. Silverman and his colleagues has found that women in controlling or abusive relationships often experience difficult using [...]

November 25th marked the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and start of the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence Campaign. Globally, one in three women experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, and researchers and advocates are working together to address this pressing issue. One major pathway to reducing [...]

In October 2017, the International Association and Adolescent Health (IAAH) held their 11th World Congress on Adolescent Health in New Delhi, India, called Investing in Adolescent Health: The Future is Now.  The conference featured researchers from all over the world, local and international global public health organizations and NGOs, the Indian Health Ministry, and most importantly, [...]

It was 11:00 AM on a hot July day. Inside a small green tent in rural fishing village on the banks of Lake Victoria, an HIV counselor was speaking with two local women about a new study to reduce alcohol use and intimate partner violence (IPV). Outside, and intoxicated fisherman staggered around the tent, hollering [...]

"We wait until the placenta is delivered before we tell the mother the sex of the baby. If it is a girl she may have a stress response in her body or feel scared of the response of her husband and mother-in-law. It could make delivering the placenta very difficult." - Nurse Mentor, Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh [...]

Violence against women (VAW) is one of the biggest issues women face worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 1 in 3 women have experienced some sort of intimate partner violence, the most common form of VAW, in their lives (WHO, 2016). Its effects are both immediate and long-term, and include physical injury, unwanted [...]

Despite major improvements in tackling global poverty and expanding education around the world over the last several decades, economic gender gaps persists, as documented by the recent report of the High Level Panel of the UN Secretary General. These gender gaps in the economy exist alongside adverse gender norms and persistently high rates of intimate [...]

Everywhere in the world, life is more difficult for women than men. The difference between men's and women's lives in low and mid-income countries (LMIC) is a source of concern for those working to achieve global justice. Women in LMIC often have limited abilities to make decisions regarding their jobs, their health (particularly their reproductive [...]

As the dust settles form the latest budget shutdown in Washington, some haze still remains around the status of the global Let Girl's Learn initiative. Let Girls Learn was formally launched by Michelle Obama in 2015 as a partnership across the private sector and several government agencies, including USAID, PEPFAR (the President's Emergency Plan for [...]

Women's Sports History: "From Strength to Resistance": Celebrating Women's History Month with Dr. Bonnie Morris First recognized in 1987,  Women's History Month (observed every March) seeks to acknowledge and celebrate the role of women in American history. In light of this celebration, the UCSD Center on Gender Equity and Health hosted Dr. Bonnie Morris Adjunct [...]

" Most women I know in this neighborhood who are using [birth control] pills hide them in a neighbor's bush so that their husbands don't find out they are using them." - Family planning clinic provider, Kibera slum community, Nairobi  In December 2016, Dr. Silverman and I traveled approximately 10,000 miles to Nairobi, Kenya to [...]

Leave no one behind. This is one of the rallying cries of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the global goals for health and development that severe as successors to the Millennium and Development Goals (MDGs). The SDGs have expanded the work begun by the MDGs by recognizing a greater breadth of social inequities that influence [...]

On world AIDS Day, following an election that called for a referendum on the elimination of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), it is important to consider the consequences of repealing the PPACA as it relates to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It is estimated that the PPACA currently supports 20 million previously uninsured people [...]