Gender Equality

This is an independent evaluation of World VIsion's 7-year quasi-experimental intervention to improve nutrition, nutrition-related rights and gender equality for women, adolescent girls, and children under five years of age in rural Bangladesh, Kenya, and Tanzania. The evaluation will collect baseline, midline, and end-line data from intervention communities, schools, and health facilities. Only baseline and endline will be collected on the comparison communities. The evaluation objectives are to test if the intervention improved indicators for (i) child anthropometry, (ii) maternal and child dietary practices, (iii) women's empowerment, and (iv) equitable health service access for nutrition and sexual and reproductive needs. The evaluation analysis will take into account gender differences in the indicators.

Introduction and Aims: The family, recognized as the smallest and most powerful social unit that forms society, is an arena where gender roles, gender identities, and inequalities are reproduced and developed. The establishment, maintenance, and continuation of a healthy marriage is the source of healthy families and, naturally, healthy individuals. Therefore, research on newly married individuals is valuable as it sheds light on future generations. This research began with the question, "How should effective gender education be designed to minimize gender inequality and the problems arising from it?" This research presents a study protocol to evaluate the effectiveness of a gender education program based on the Capacity, Opportunity, and Motivation to Behave (COM-B) model. Furthermore, this study aims to take solid steps in the first stage of family formation through a one-year follow-up of newly married couples and thus create healthy and strong families. Method: This study will be conducted as a two-phase, prospective, single-center, two-group (1:1) parallel design, pre-test-post-test randomized controlled trial. The Capacity, Opportunity, and Motivation Behavior (COM-B) model is a theoretical framework consisting of six components to understand and support behavior change. In the first phase, a gender education program based on the COM-B model (COMBTC) will be developed, and in the second phase, the effectiveness of COMBTC will be evaluated with 100 newly married couples. The sample will consist of 100 couples who have been married for no more than one month and live in central Şanlıurfa, divided into intervention and control groups at a 1:1 ratio. Participants in the intervention group will undergo a 3-week, multi-component education program based on the COM-B model, while participants in the control group will receive routine general advice. Assessments will be conducted at baseline, after the education, and at 6-11 months. Research data will be collected using a personal information form, a healthy family scale, a marital role expectations scale, a marital problem-solving scale, and a family harmony scale. The data will be evaluated using descriptive statistical analyses and relevant tests.

The dominating proportion of patients in the ICU are men. Studies indicate that men receive more mechanical ventilation, vasoactive drugs, renal replacement therapy, invasive monitoring and have longer length of stay in the ICU. These differences do not unambiguously translate into a survival benefit for men; if survival would be altered if women were admitted to ICU in the same extent is unknown. Factors affecting ICU admission include age, co-morbidities, physiological parameters (indicating severity of the acute illness) and, additionally, the number of available ICU beds. Factors that should not affect ICU admission include patient gender or ethnicity. This study aims at studying if bias against women and people of certain ethnicities exist. Do clinicians have differing thresholds for ICU admission due to non-medical reasons? The investigators propose testing this hypothesis using a blinded randomized factorial survey study.