Gender and Women's Health Unit
Welcome to the Gender and Women's Health Unit
We aim to advance the health of women in Australia and internationally, to reduce inequity and create positive change. Through research, teaching and public engagement, our work contributes to a robust knowledge base about the health effects of gender inequity and its intersection with social, economic and cultural factors.
We are a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre in Women’s Health and work in partnership with scholars and agencies in the Asia-Pacific region to increase regional research capacity.
Our Unit is based at the Centre for Health Equity at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne.
We are an interdisciplinary team with expertise in public health, health services research, social psychology, sociology, geography, medical anthropology, epidemiology, evaluation, and applied ethics. We teach, supervise graduate research students, and conduct research across a range of areas related to gender, health and society. Our current research focuses on violence against women; sexual, reproductive and maternal health and rights; women’s health, and the environment and health. We use qualitative, quantitative, participatory, and mixed methods, and evidence synthesis in our work. We have strong credentials in community engagement and in contributing to the translation of research into change in policy and practice.
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Research Projects
We investigate how gender and social inequalities shape health outcomes and access to health services.
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Publications
A list of our Unit’s peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters and major reports published in recent years.
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Graduate Research
We are passionate about research capacity building, and mentoring and training emerging researchers.
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MPH Research Projects
We train Master of Public Health students to undertake a high-quality and rigorous research during their degree.
Our work aims to advance the health of women in Australia and internationally, to reduce inequity and create positive change. We do this in the following ways:
- Through our writing and research, we generate evidence about how gender intersects with socio-economic position, ethnicity, disability, migration and other factors that cause inequities.
- We prioritise engagement with policy makers and service providers and have expertise in participatory approaches that explicitly aim to drive social change and reduce inequity.
- We measure population-level differences on key health outcomes between women and men on significant national issues such as housing affordability stress.
- We work closely with members of those communities with the most at stake in our research, including members of migrant and refugee communities, people with disabilities, and people on low incomes.
- We contribute to training and mentoring graduate students and early career researchers.
Our subjects are designed to teach the latest concepts and theories in gender and health inequalities.
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Women and Global Health
This subject situates women and their health in a dynamic context of development, globalisation and change, to examine key health issues and explore factors that impact health and illness.
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Gender and Health
This subject will introduce sex/gender as a social construct and take a historical perspective to explore women’s health and men’s health movements.
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Community Engagement for Health Impact
This subject will give students an understanding of, and experience in, the principles, processes and some of the methods used in participatory health research.
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Preventing Violence Against Women
This subject will look at evidence about the impact of violence against women, contributors to violence against women, theories of social change, and prevention science and frameworks.
The Gender and Women's Health Unit has a range of Australian and international networks across the health sector, research institutions, community organisations, government ministries and departments.
Our staff are regularly interviewed on radio and appear on podcasts as experts, and also write conversation pieces on their research.
Watch these short videos about current research into gender and housing, work and mental health and the prevention of violence against women.
We have been a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre in Women's Health since 1994. We work in partnership with countries in the Western Pacific region to address major gender inequality issues.
We work closely with the Centre of Research Excellence in Disability and Health (CRE-DH) which is focused on improving the health outcomes for people with disability in Australia.
The Centre is funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council.