State-Level Sexism and Women's Health Care Access in the United States: Differences by Race/Ethnicity, 2014-2019

Structural gendered racism as conceptualized by immigrant women in the United States

RATIONALE

Immigrants represent a rapidly growing proportion of the population, yet the many ways in which structural inequities, including racism, xenophobia, and sexism, influence their health remains largely understudied. Perspectives from immigrant women can highlight intersectional dimensions of structural gendered racism and the ways in which racial and gender-based systems of structural oppression interact.

OBJECTIVE

This study aims to show the multilevel manifestations of structural gendered racism in the health experiences of immigrant women living in New York City.

METHOD

Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted in 2020 and 2021 with 44 cisgender immigrant women from different national origins in New York City to explore how immigrant women experienced structural gendered racism and its pathways to their health. Interviews were thematically analyzed using a constant comparative approach.

RESULTS

Participants expressed intersectional dimensions of structural gendered racism and the anti-immigrant climate through restrictive immigration policy and issues related to citizenship status, disproportionate immigration enforcement and criminalization, economic exploitation, and gendered interpersonal racism experienced across a range of systems and contexts. Participants weighed their concerns for safety and facing racism as part of their life course and health decisions for themselves and their families.

CONCLUSIONS

The perspectives and experiences of immigrant women are key to identifying multilevel solutions for the burdens of structural gendered racism, particularly among individuals and communities of non-U.S. national origin. Understanding how racism, sexism, xenophobia, and intersecting systems of oppression impact immigrant women is critical for advancing health equity.

Methods for structural sexism and population health research: Introducing a novel analytic framework to capture life-course and intersectional effects

Accumulating evidence links structural sexism to gendered health inequities, yet methodological challenges have precluded comprehensive examinations into life-course and/or intersectional effects. To help address this gap, we introduce an analytic framework that uses sequential conditional mean models (SCMMs) to jointly account for longitudinal exposure trajectories and moderation by multiple dimensions of social identity/position, which we then apply to study how early life-course exposure to U.S. state-level structural sexism shapes mental health outcomes within and between gender groups. Data came from the Growing Up Today Study, a cohort of 16,875 children aged 9-14 years in 1996 who we followed through 2016. Using a composite index of relevant public policies and societal conditions (e.g., abortion bans, wage gaps), we assigned each U.S. state a year-specific structural sexism score and calculated participants' cumulative exposure by averaging the scores associated with states they had lived in during the study period, weighted according to duration of time spent in each. We then fit a series of SCMMs to estimate overall and group-specific associations between cumulative exposure from baseline through a given study wave and subsequent depressive symptomology; we also fit models using simplified (i.e., non-cumulative) exposure variables for comparison purposes. Analyses revealed that cumulative exposure to structural sexism: (1) was associated with significantly increased odds of experiencing depressive symptoms by the subsequent wave; (2) disproportionately impacted multiply marginalized groups (e.g., sexual minority girls/women); and (3) was more strongly associated with depressive symptomology compared to static or point-in-time exposure operationalizations (e.g., exposure in a single year). Substantively, these findings suggest that long-term exposure to structural sexism may contribute to the inequitable social patterning of mental distress among young people living in the U.S. More broadly, the proposed analytic framework represents a promising approach to examining the complex links between structural sexism and health across the life course and for diverse social groups.

Health consequences of structural sexism: Conceptual foundations, empirical evidence and priorities for future research

A nascent body of work has begun exploring the health consequences of structural sexism. This article provides an overview of the concept of structural sexism and an elaboration of the potential pathways connecting it to health. Next, it reviews existing measurement approaches and the current state of empirical evidence on the relationship between structural sexism and health in the United States. Finally, it highlights key priorities for future research, which include: expanding and refining measures, increasing public data availability, broadening the scope of inquiry to include a wider range of outcomes, exploring mechanisms, incorporating intersectionality, and applying a life course lens.

Structural Sexism and Preventive Health Care Use in the United States

Preventive health care use can reduce the risk of disease, disability, and death. Thus, it is critical to understand factors that shape preventive care use. A growing body of research identifies structural sexism as a driver of population health, but it remains unknown if structural sexism is linked to preventive care use and, if so, whether the relationship differs for women and men. Gender performance and gendered power and resource allocation perspectives lead to competing hypotheses regarding these questions. This study explores the relationship between structural sexism and preventive care in gender-stratified, multilevel models that combine data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System with state-level data (N = 425,454). We find that in states with more structural sexism, both men and women were less likely to seek preventive care. These findings support the gender performance hypothesis for men and the gendered power and resource allocation hypothesis for men and women.

Structural Sexism and Breastfeeding in the United States, 2016-2021

INTRODUCTION

Recent studies demonstrate that structural sexism erodes women's health and impedes access to healthcare. This study extends this research to examine the relationship between structural sexism and breastfeeding initiation and duration in the United States.

METHOD

A multifaceted state-level structural sexism index was constructed and merged with responses from the 2016-2021 National Survey of Children's Health by state and child's birth year. For children ages six months to 5 years, the prevalence of being ever breastfed and breastfed for at least six months was measured across levels of structural sexism. Multivariable logistic regression analyzed the association of structural sexism with breastfeeding outcomes, net of individual and family characteristics.

RESULTS

Higher levels of structural sexism were associated with lower odds of breastfeeding initiation and lower odds of breastfeeding for at least six months net of family and child characteristics. In addition, sensitivity analyses show that variations in state breastfeeding laws did not explain these differences.

DISCUSSION

This study highlights structural sexism's role in limiting breastfeeding initiation and duration. Breastfeeding promotions and guidelines should consider the broader context of structural sexism.

Gender as a social and structural variable: research perspectives from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Gender is a social and structural variable that encompasses multiple domains, each of which influences health: gender identity and expression, gender roles and norms, gendered power relations, and gender equality and equity. As such, gender has far-reaching impacts on health. Additional research is needed to continue delineating and untangling the effects of gender from the effects of sex and other biological variables. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) vision for women's health is a world in which the influence of sex and/or gender are integrated into the health research enterprise. However, much of the NIH-supported research on gender and health has, to date, been limited to a small number of conditions (e.g., HIV, mental health, pregnancy) and locations (e.g., sub-Saharan Africa; India). Opportunities exist to support transdisciplinary knowledge transfer and interdisciplinary knowledge building by advancing health-related social science research that incorporates best practices from disciplines that have well-established methods, theories, and frameworks for examining the health impacts of gender and other social, cultural, and structural variables.

Enhancing the Utility of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to Identify Drivers of Rising Mortality Rates in the United States

A recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) highlights rising rates of working-age mortality in the United States, portending troubling population health trends for this group as they age. The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is an invaluable resource for researchers studying health and aging dynamics among Americans ages 50 and above and has strong potential to be used by researchers to provide insights about the drivers of rising U.S. mortality rates. This paper assesses the strengths and limitations of HRS data for identifying drivers of rising mortality rates in the U.S. and provides recommendations to enhance the utility of the HRS in this regard. Among our many recommendations, we encourage the HRS to prioritize the following: link cause of death information to respondents; reduce the age of eligibility for inclusion in the sample; increase the rural sample size; enhance the existing HRS Contextual Data Resource by incorporating longitudinal measures of structural determinants of health; develop additional data linkages to capture residential settings and characteristics across the life course; and add measures that capture drug use, gun ownership, and social media use.

Greater community vulnerability is associated with poor living donor navigator program fidelity

BACKGROUND

Community-level factors contribute to living donor kidney transplantation disparities but may also influence the interventions aimed to mitigate these disparities. The Living Donor Navigator Program was designed to separate the advocacy role from the patient in need of transplantation-friends/family are encouraged to participate as the patients' advocates to identify living donors, though some of the patients participate alone as self-advocates. Self-advocates have a lower living donor kidney transplantation likelihood compared to the patients with an advocate. We sought to evaluate the relationship between the patients' community-level vulnerability and living donor navigator self-advocacy as a surrogate for program fidelity.

METHODS

This single-center, retrospective study included 110 Living Donor Navigator participants (April 2017-June 2019). Program fidelity was assessed using the participants' advocacy status. Measures of community vulnerability were obtained from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Social Vulnerability Index. Modified Poisson regression was used to evaluate the association between community-level vulnerability and living donor navigator self-advocacy.

RESULTS

Of the 110 participants, 19% (n = 21) were self-advocates. For every 10% increase in community-level vulnerability, patients had 17% higher risk of self-advocacy (adjusted relative risk 1.17, 95% confidence interval: 1.03-1.32, P = .01). Living in areas with greater unemployment (adjusted relative risk: 1.18, 95% confidence interval: 1.04-1.33, P = .01), single-parent households (adjusted relative risk: 1.23, 95% confidence interval: 1.06-1.42, P = .006), minority population (adjusted relative risk: 1.30, 95% confidence interval: 1.04-1.55, P = .02), or no-vehicle households (adjusted relative risk: 1.17, 95% confidence interval: 1.02-1.35, P = .02) were associated with increased risk of self-advocacy.

CONCLUSION

Having a greater community-level vulnerability was associated with poor Living Donor Navigator Program fidelity. The potential barriers identified using the Social Vulnerability Index may direct resource allocation and program refinement to optimize program fidelity and efficacy for all participants.