Gender and Health is the first book to examine how men’s and women’s lives and their physiology contribute to differences in their health. In a thoughtful synthesis of diverse literatures, the authors demonstrate that modern societies’ health problems ultimately involve a combination of policies, personal behavior, and choice. The book is designed for researchers, policymakers, and others who seek to understand how the choices of individuals, families, communities, and governments contribute to health. It can inform men and women at each of these levels how to better integrate health implications into their everyday decisions and actions. "There is a growing body of international research on gender and health research, but much of it concerns either women or men, and focuses on either social or biological factors in explanation. By overcoming these limitations, Chloe Bird and Patricia Rieker’s 'constrained choice' approach is an excellent and timely framework for the analysis of the complex relationship between gender and health. Clearly written and supported by a wealth of research evidence, the book will be of great interest to both researchers and policy makers." - Ellen Annandale, University of Leicester "What a valuable book! Bird and Rieker, two of the nation's premier thinkers on health policy, have sifted through the mountains of research on gender and health, and separated the stereotypic from the statistically relevant. As America finally confronts its health care crisis, this will be the primer for policymakers, and a significant contribution to the national conversation." - Michael Kimmel, SUNY Stony Brook "Gender and Health: The Effects of Constrained Choices and Social Policies is an engaging, timely, and useful book about men's and women's health. In it, Bird and Rieker summarize the issues, their histories and relevant findings. They critique differing views and offer a synthesis useful to researchers, clinicians, policy makers and individuals making decisions about their own lives. Gender and Health avoids the polemical style of feminism and the aseptic style of medicine. It treats gender and health as a flesh-and-blood issue of real people in a real world defined by physical environments, social roles and strata, culture, and history, all interacting with human biology.” - John Mirowsky, University of Texas at Austin "Bird and Rieker have provided an important and timely contribution to understanding the differences in the health of men and women. The authors have synthesized a complex body of interdisciplinary evidence and provided a novel framework of "constrained choice" to explain how gender is related to health. Their writing is accessible both to seasoned researchers and to general readers." - Carol Weisman, Pennsylvania State University "Bird and Rieker make explicit the assumptions on which they build their model of constrained choice.... This formulated analysis has a major implication for health policy: if social policy, community, work, and family constraints on individuals’ choices about health-related matters were reduced, especially with respect to their sex biases, then sex-based disparities in health might diminish. The analysis likewise has a major implication for clinical practice: physicians should not assume that responsibility for a patient’s current health status is reducible simply to that patient’s choices, as if those choices were free of potent social constraints." - JAMA "Gender and Health does not provide answers to the questions posed. Rather, the authors challenge their readers to adopt a broader perspective in their approach to the formulation and evaluation of social policy, the conduct of research, and the provision of patient care through an integrated consideration of the biological and social dimensions of gender." - New England Journal of Medicine "This book is essential for students and researchers of public policy. It is also invaluable to health psychologists.... [It] increases our understanding of how social policies affect individuals' choices, which is necessary in understanding the factors that affect the ease with which one can choose health. At the same time, this book also encourages individuals to be more cognizant of how decisions, such as whether to take a new job or move, are influenced by the complex interactions between their gender, their surrounding families, communities, workplaces, and societies." - Psychology of Women Quarterly "This volume is clearly written, well organized, and well referenced.... Libraries will find this to be a useful acquisition in support of health sciences/public health, gender studies, or public policy programs.... Recommended." - Choice "Gender and Health is an ambitious book with multiple aims and multiple intended audiences.... The authors' attention to macrolevel influences on health outcomes―in the form of social policies, local social and built environments, and workplace conditions―is importan