Addressing the dearth of critical gender analysis in public health and medical pedagogy: an interdisciplinary seminar to generate student-created teaching examples

Crit Public Health. 2019;29(1):18-26. doi: 10.1080/09581596.2017.1419166. Epub 2018 Feb 19.

Abstract

Gender-based analysis in public health is a systematic examination of how population health is shaped by systems of gender relations, involving policies and laws, programs and services, research priorities, social norms and practices, and public discourse. To address the paucity of critical gender-based analysis training in most public health, medical, and health policy courses, we designed the capstone course in the Women, Gender, and Health (WGH) Interdisciplinary Concentration at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. This course enables students to develop brief teaching examples to expose students in non-WGH courses to gender-based analysis (e.g., challenging simplistic conflations of gender and sex). The assignment has yielded 19 teaching examples (several available online at no cost) and offers a model that can be used to address analogous curriculum gaps in relation to other social determinants of health, including racism, social class, sexuality, and immigration.

Keywords: feminism; gender; pedagogy; population health; public policy; sex.