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Gender has been neglected in models of the social determinants of health. We use walking as a case study to demonstrate how gender might be incorporated into multilevel social determinants of health frameworks to investigate health behaviours. We found that while men and women had some similar individual (e.g. confidence in doing regular physical activity) and environmental (e.g. presence of destinations) predictors of walking there were also gender differences in the associations found at both of these levels. For example, low levels of education were only associated with men's walking time while having people in the household who made walking easy or hard was only associated with women's walking time. Likewise, having a variety of places to walk to was important for women's walking but not men's. These results indicate that both universal and gender-specific approaches to health education, health promotion and planning might be needed to improve walking levels. Key words: Gender, walking, social determinants of health, Introduction Inequalities are firmly on the agendas of government and non-government organisations worldwide. Until recently the fields of health inequalities and gender and health have not intersected, however in the [...]

Gender equity describes the distribution between men and women of social and material resources and decision-making powers. Women's experiences of gender equity are likely to influence their contraceptive use. Multilevel analysis of two databases: the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles from the United Kingdom and the United Nations' Fertility and Family Surveys, was undertaken to explore the association between gender equity measured at two spatial scales (small areas and countries) and women's contraception use. Results suggest that the spatial scale at which gender equity is considered is important. Gender equity was associated with contraception use at a local level, but not at the country level. Further, gender equity (at a local level) benefited women with less education in terms of increasing their likelihood of contraception use compared with more highly educated women. Results suggest gender equity is a potential pathway to reducing socio-economic inequalities in health in developed settings. Key words: Gender equity, contraception use, Introduction There is now voluminous evidence that being poor, having lower levels of education and working in manual, unskilled jobs is bad for your health (Draper et al. 2004). People [...]