UNASSIGNED: Gender inequality influences access to and demand for healthcare services including vaccines. The gender gap in the COVID-19 vaccine coverage doesn\'t account for the skewed male-female ratio in India. The pandemic response has failed to recognize the barriers faced by women in accessing healthcare. These barriers are intensified in the case of pregnant women who are considered as a high-risk group for COVID-19 infection. The present study was aimed to examine the factors influencing the uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine in pregnant women.
UNASSIGNED: The study was carried out in the Department of OBGY, GMCH, Aurangabad, Maharashtra. Pregnant women above 18 years who had at least one antenatal visit were considered for the purpose of the study. Women who consented to participate in the study were administered a survey questionnaire by a healthcare provider which included a demographic, socio-economic, and obstetric profile of pregnant women, knowledge and attitude toward vaccines, and gender-related barriers. The chi-square test and independent t test were done to identify the factors influencing the uptake of the vaccine.
UNASSIGNED: About 22% of the women had not taken the vaccine (100 out of 444). Factors like age, residence, and education of women were not found to be associated with the uptake of vaccines. Husband\'s education was found to be significantly associated (p < 0.05) with vaccine uptake. The presence of complications during pregnancy also significantly deterred women from taking the vaccine. Concerns about the safety of the vaccine, side effects for the fetus, and negative opinions of family members about the vaccine were also found to be associated with non-uptake of the vaccine by pregnant women.
UNASSIGNED: Healthcare providers during antenatal care can play an important role by addressing concerns regarding the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine in pregnant women.

BACKGROUND: Standardized health-data collection enables effective disaster responses and patient care. Emergency medical teams use the Japan Surveillance in Post-Extreme Emergencies and Disasters (J-SPEED) reporting template to collect patient data. EMTs submit data on treated patients to an EMT coordination cell. The World Health Organization\'s (WHO) EMT minimum dataset (MDS) offers an international standard for disaster data collection.
OBJECTIVE: The goal of this study was to analyze age and gender distribution of medical consultations in EMT during disasters.
METHODS: Data collected from 2016 to 2020 using the J-SPEED/MDS tools during six disasters in Japan and Mozambique were analyzed. Linear regression with data smoothing via the moving average method was employed to identify trends in medical consultations based on age and gender.
RESULTS: 31,056 consultations were recorded: 13,958 in Japan and 17,098 in Mozambique. Women accounted for 56.3% and 55.7% of examinees in Japan and Mozambique, respectively. Children accounted for 6.8% of consultations in Japan and 28.1% in Mozambique. Elders accounted for 1.32 and 1.52 times more consultations than adults in Japan and Mozambique, respectively.
CONCLUSIONS: Study findings highlight the importance of considering age-specific healthcare requirements in disaster planning. Real-time data collection tools such as J-SPEED and MDS, which generate both daily reports and raw data for in-depth analysis, facilitate the validation of equitable access to healthcare services, emphasize the specific needs of vulnerable groups, and enable the consideration of cultural preferences to improve healthcare provision by EMTs.

Women represented 29% of cardiology trainees and 16% of consultants in the UK in 2021. While the numbers of women in cardiology have increased over the last 20 years, these proportions remain among the lowest in comparison with other medical specialties. This essay aims to explore the contributing factors behind, and plans to reduce, gender disparity in cardiology. PubMed was searched using keywords such as \'gender\', \'inequality\', \'women\', \'training\' and \'cardiology\'. Retrieved studies were screened for themes contributing towards, and strategies to overcome, gender inequality within cardiology. Reasons for gender inequality included poor perceptions of cardiology as a female-friendly specialty, experiences of gender-based discrimination, inflexible working hours, poor work- life balance, and lack of female role models. Recommended resolutions should target these themes; increase opportunities for flexible working hours, enforce a discrimination-free workplace culture, and encourage mentoring relationships between female senior and junior doctors. Improving the experience of the existing female workforce in cardiology will have a knock-on effect on the perceptions of trainees rotating through departments, in addition to initiatives promoting cardiology as a female-friendly specialty. In conclusion, promoting gender equality within cardiology remains an ongoing challenge. Nationwide efforts to increase retention and improve perceptions should target issues highlighted by the voices of women.

OBJECTIVE: Communication tools have long been used to address complex social policy problems, known as wicked problems, in communities around the world. However, the challenge has remained, how do we measure the impact of social change with communication for development (C4D)? Evaluators recommend utilising evaluation tools that take a wider systems-based approach to assist in the evaluation of C4D projects. Health Communication Resources (HCR) Inc., a health promotion charity that supports C4D projects around the world, aimed to trial a tool to assist evaluation of a project addressing gender inequality, an underlying driver of family violence in the community.
METHODS: WickedLab\'s tool for systemic change was utilised to assist the evaluation of the complex adaptive system. The research team mapped the system that existed in Geraldton working towards addressing the wicked problem of gender inequality.
RESULTS: Mapping the system highlighted how integral C4D actions were in maintaining and strengthening the system as it works together towards gender equality in the community.
CONCLUSIONS: A systems-based approach can strengthen evaluation and demonstrates the role C4D projects play in addressing wicked problems in a defined location. SO WHAT?: WickedLab\'s tool for systemic change provides significant potential for the evaluation of other health promotion and communication for development projects.

UNASSIGNED: The purpose of this study was to examine factors affecting depression trait among male intimate partner violence (IPV) victims in Japan utilizing a multiple linear regression analysis.
UNASSIGNED: A web-based questionnaire survey was conducted. Male IPV victims living in Japan were recruited to answer the questionnaire on the website on February 25-26, 2021. A total of 16,414 subjects were enrolled, of whom 1466 respondents were included in the study. Other than IPV exposure, information about sociodemographic characteristics, past traumatic experiences and psychiatric history was collected. The Domestic Violence Screening Inventory (DVSI), a 20-item questionnaire regarding IPV exposure, and the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) were used to determine the intensity and the type of IPV harm and to screen for depression, respectively.
UNASSIGNED: The victims were more frequently subject to psychological abuse than to physical violence. Based on PHQ-9 scores, 10.7% of respondents exhibited moderate to severe depression. In the DVSI score, 79.2% of respondents required \"observation and support.\" The lowest level of academic attainment (junior high school), positive psychiatric history, foregoing divorce to avoid adverse childhood experiences of their offspring, childhood exposure to domestic violence, younger age, having no children, and experience of school bullying were shown to be significantly associated with depression trait.
UNASSIGNED: Male IPV harm has a multilayered complexity. The sociodemographic characteristics and experiences of victims\' own have a greater impact on depression trait than direct violent harm, suggesting that the violence-focused support might be inadequate for male victims. Comprehensive supports are urgently needed.

Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study is to describe how women academic department chairs in emergency medicine, surgery, and anesthesiology experience humor in the workplace. Method: Interviews were conducted with 35 women department chairs in academic medicine from 27 institutions that aimed to describe women\'s leadership emergence. The data from the primary study yielded rich and revealing themes involving participants\' experiences with humor in the context of their leadership roles, justifying a secondary analysis focusing specifically on these experiences. Relevant remarks were extracted, coded, and summarized. Results: Participants discussed two broad types of humor-related experiences. First, they described how they responded to aggressive gender-based humor directed at themselves or their colleagues by tolerating it or expressing disapproval. This humor includes demeaning quips, insulting monikers, sexist jokes, and derogatory stories. Participants often did not confront this humor directly as they feared being rejected or ostracized by colleagues. Second, they described how they initiated humor to address gender-related workplace issues by highlighting gender inequalities, coping with sexual harassment and assault, and managing gender-based leadership challenges. Participants felt constrained in their own use of humor because of the need to be taken seriously as women leaders. Conclusion: Women leaders in academic medicine use humor to confront gender-related issues and experience aggressive gender-based humor in the workplace. The constraints placed on women leaders discourage them from effectively confronting this aggressive gender-based humor and perpetuating gender inequities. Eliminating aggressive gender-based humor is needed to create safe and equitable work environments in academic medicine.

The literature provides an incomplete picture of gender dynamics in later-life domestic work. This couple-level study examines the division of female-typed, gender-neutral, and male-typed housework among middle-aged and older Chinese couples, comparing working and non-working couples. It also explores the different relationships between education, income, and the division of housework in these two groups of couples. The findings derived from national time-use data reveal that, first, non-working couples exhibit a smaller gender gap in household labor compared to working couples, primarily because wives take on more gender-neutral tasks, while husbands assume more female-typed tasks. Second, female-typed housework exhibits the largest gender disparity, followed by gender-neutral housework. Third, educational and economic resources play distinct roles in shaping the division of household chores in the two groups. Furthermore, the time spent on paid work is a more significant factor in explaining gender differences in housework among working couples than education and income.

OBJECTIVE: This study seeks to assess whether and to what extent caregiver work strain is ameliorated by the presence of additional family caregivers and formal service use. Building on the stress process model and stress-appraisal moderation, we examine how formal and informal support varies in associations with caregiver distress for men and women.
METHODS: This study utilizes data provided by the National Study of Caregiving, which is linked with care-recipient information from the National Health and Aging Trends Study. Using panel methods for the pooled waves, we estimated caregiver outcomes of emotional well-being on the intersection of experiences of work strain and (a) the number of additional caregivers and (b) utilization of 6 different types of formal support.
RESULTS: Additional informal caregivers for each respective care recipient are associated with lower levels of distress, although utilization of formal services (paid help and Medicaid funding) is positively associated with caregiver distress. Informal support can offset the impact of work strain, but interactions are only evident for women caregivers.
CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that informal support, exemplified by the number of additional caregivers, corresponds with reduced emotional distress among employed caregivers and can mitigate the negative impacts of work strain. However, positive associations between formal support and male and female caregiver distress suggest that the context of formal services may offer limited or untimely support. This study is expected to broaden our understanding of informal caregiving in later life and provide practical implications on how to sustain informal care.

Recent decades have seen an increasing gap occurring between the \'desired\' and \'actual\' family size of middle-class and professional women. This situation of \'unrealised fertility\' and \'incomplete families\' carries implications at a population, but also couple and individual level. This paper explores how middle-class professional women make decisions about partnering and parenthood and how these are shaped by a contemporary neoliberal feminist discourse which articulates the possibility of \'having it all\' through engagement in careful life planning, appropriate self-investment, and by drawing on new technologies of reproductive biomedicine. Informed by semi-structured interviews with UK and US women conducted at two different points in time, it explores how they approach and experience the process of relationship formation in the face of age-related fertility decline. It also examines how the use of social egg freezing shape their romantic and family building expectations but also their interactions with (potential) partners. In doing so, it explores how gendered cultural dating scripts and unequal gender power relations shape the formation and progression of intimate relationships in a manner which can disempower women as they age. It therefore questions whether egg freezing may be the \'great equaliser\' that some have hoped.

While significant progress has been made in improving the wellbeing of women and girls around the world, a gender gap still exists between men and women which is very evident in Ghana. Gender inequalities continue to persist in Ghana because of cultural gender norms that exalt and favor men and put women in subordinate and subservient roles. These cultural gender norms hinder women\'s development and widen gender inequality between men and women in different system levels of society. Therefore, there is a need to examine the influence of these cultural gender norms on women\'s lives using a systems framework to capture a full picture of women\'s experiences at these systemic levels of society. In this paper, we use Bronfenbrenner\'s ecological systems multilevel approach to examine the impact of these cultural gender norms on women\'s lives at the different system levels. We conducted a desk review of studies published in sub-Saharan Africa focused on cultural gender norms and gender inequality. The findings showed that the impact of cultural gender norms on gender inequality at the levels of the four social systems (microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem) are interconnected, creating and widening the inequality gap between men and women. Cultural gender norms influence gender role socialization in the home, which then transmits to the school and religious institutions as the mesosystem. At the school level, cultural gender norms act as a mesosystem manifest through discriminatory classroom practices, gender role assignment of school responsibilities, and gender role representations in textbooks. In Christianity and Islam, cultural gender norms create doctrines that enforce men\'s domination over women, and, in the workplace, cultural gender norms have gendered labor by defining a man\'s occupation and limiting women to domestic and low-paying occupations. The mass media is the exosystem that displays images of women to fit cultural gender norms of what is defined as acceptable for women. Finally, the macrosystem is the overall sociocultural norms that have been accepted by society that perpetuate discriminatory practices against women.