vaginapagina | More on my women's health course

As you may remember, I'm taking a class on "Women's Health and the Life Course" this semester. (Course description here, list of readings (friends-only) here.) I would've posted this on Tuesday, but my laptop's power cable died tragically and I had to get a new one.

The class is taught by Dr. Manisha Sengupta. I think she got her doctorate in something related to public health. I'm pretty sure she's not an MD. Right now, she works primarily as a demographer for the US government, studying gender differences in health and health care, particularly in the elderly. She's most interested in issues facing elderly women and women in developing countries. (Particularly India, since she's Indian.) She also investigates the effects of health programs implemented by the World Bank, UNICEF, and the WHO, trying to find out if they're properly addressing gender disparities in health care.

The course will focus on developing countries for some sections, particularly when we're talking about things like infant-child issues and basic health care stuff. We will also talk about developed countries when discussing violence against women, reproductive health, and other issues that are still important in developed countries.

There is exactly one male taking the course, a really nice public health major I used to work with. Dr. Sengupta says it was like this last semester, too. Oh well.

The class grades will be 40% class participation, since it's a seminar course. The other 60% will be a group project, a report about "a major debate on a health issue related to women", done in groups (30%) and a 1500-2500 word essay chosen from a set of provided topics (30%).

There is no book for the class. The majority of the readings are online in PDF format, but some may be handed out in class.

The course description is as follows: "This course is a seminar on women's health through the lifecourse. It assumes some basic knowledge of gender issues. This course will examine the lifecourse determinants of women's health. This approach explicitly recognizes that influences on health across the life cycle are strongly shaped by cumulative exposure to biological, psychological, behavioral or socioeconomic factors. We will critically reflect uon the current status of knowledge about gender inequalities in health and address how events and transitions during the lifecourse including employment, marriage, and family formation affect women's health."

This week's readings: (contact me if you want more... information... about them hem hem...)

O'Rand, Angela
The precious and the precocious: Understanding cumulative disadvantage and cumulative advantage over the life course

Elo, Irma and Preston
Effects of Early-Life Conditions on Adult Mortality: A Review

Bird, Chloe and Patricia P. Rieker
Gender matters: an integrated model for understanding men's and women's health

Verbrugge, Lois
The Twain Meet: Empirical Explanations of Sex Differences in Health and Mortality

Once I actually read these things (tonight or tomorrow, or Tuesday morning at the worst) I'll post a summary. I'll probably put it in with the entry about next week's class, so as to keep the community-spamming to a minimum.