This presentation will take as its central focus the issue of gender to include both women and men in its conceptualization. However, beyond that, it will also see individuals as not only gendered but as raced, sexed, classed, regioned and cultured.

Frank will argue that these are important considerations in our teaching and education of health care professionals. Using a specific model of change for teachers and institutions, language, pedagogy, curriculum and policies, all of which inform institutional climate, will be discussed. The talk is framed by an understanding that, if in Canada we are committed to issues of social justice, universal health care and equity, then knowledge about all forms of inequities must be addressed.

Addressing women’s health necessarily requires grappling with issues of gender, sex, and social inequalities in health. This presentation will review the conceptual debates leading to the distinction between “sex” and “gender” as biological and social constructs. Drawing upon ecosocial theory, a diverse set of examples will be presented in which gender relations and sex-linked biology are singly, neither, or both relevant as independent or synergistic determinants of the selected outcomes.

Some of the contemporary controversies concerning the measurement of social class, socioeconomic position, and their links to gender & racial/ethnic inequalities in health, will be discussed, as well as some of the complexities in understanding the population burden of breast cancer.

Tonight, relying on a life-cycle approach, I chose to focus on three seasons or moments of women’s life: adolescence, mid-age and old age. For each of these ages in life, I have been searching a significant feature or trait capturing how society not only influences but determines women’s health in our Western world culture. I will therefore not discuss the over- and under-medicalization of women’s health, or the gender-based power structure of the health care sciences, two topics I have often analyzed in public. Nor will I focus on specific women’s health conditions and diseases, unless identifying them en passant. I want instead to try to understand from within why it is that young girls become anorexic and middle aged women become depressed and addicted to substance abuses in important numbers, when boys and men do not. I want to discuss how the Canadian society affect the health of its 15 million females.