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Women's Health

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Women have unique health needs, and face inequity in both quality and outcomes of health care. RAND's work has highlighted gender gaps in health care access and quality, measured the health needs of specific female populations, evaluated programs aimed at improving outcomes, and demonstrated how policy impacts women's options.

Commentary
Countering Abortion Misinformation in the Post-Roe Environment
Misinformation could become a major barrier to individuals trying to find safe, legal, and quality reproductive care. How might states, health insurers, and technology companies address this problem?
Jul 6, 2022
Commentary
Doubling NIH Funding for Women's Health Would Yield Substantial Return on Investment
The scientific evidence base generally is biased toward the male body as a result of a long history of generous funding for diseases that predominantly affect men and underfunding for those that predominantly affect women. But the cost of the science pales in comparison to the price we continue to pay for what we don't know about caring for women.
Jul 8, 2022

Explore Women's Health

Journal Article
Adolescents' Contraceptive Use with School-Discordant Partners: Exploring Individual- and Relationship-Level Characteristics
Characteristics of romantic relationships and contraceptive use were examined among 1,043 female and 961 male Add Health respondents. Females (but not males) were less likely to use condom with partners not from their schools or older partners.
Jun 20, 2023
Journal Article
Evaluation of Approaches to Recruitment of Racially and Ethnically Diverse Breast Cancer Patients from an Integrated Health Care Setting for Collection of Observational Social Network Data
We compared approaches to recruitment of diverse women with breast cancer in a study of social networks. Mailed letter was the best approach to recruit diverse women with breast cancer and collection of social network data.
Jun 14, 2023
Commentary
Your Health Insurance May Not Be As Good As Your State Requires—and It's Perfectly Legal
Massachusetts has a law to ensure ease of access to birth control pills, saying there should be no copays and women can fill a 12-month prescription at once. Infertility care has similar protections. But many health plans don't have to comply with state laws because they are “self-insured.”
Jun 9, 2023
Report
Birth-Centered Outcomes Research Engagement (B-CORE) in Medi-Cal: Community-Generated Recommendations to Decrease Maternal Mortality and Severe Maternal Morbidity
The B-CORE project, described in this report, applied the deliberative democracy method to engage affected community members in problem-solving focused on maternal health inequities in California.
May 31, 2023
Journal Article
Home Visiting for First-Time Parents: Community Innovation
We outline lessons from the First Born home visiting program for other universal programs, including the pros and cons of universal services, the expectation that universal programs will have population-level impact, and barriers to innovation.
May 25, 2023
Journal Article
State Experiences Linking Medicaid Data With Birth Certificates and Other Data Sources
We completed a literature review, developed an inventory of linkage efforts, and facilitated discussions to understand the technical details, experiences creating and maintaining linkages, and barriers or facilitators to establishing linkages.
May 4, 2023
Blog
Truth Decay and National Security, Gun Violence, Blockading Crimea: RAND Weekly Recap
This weekly recap focuses on Truth Decay and national security, America's gun violence problem, how Ukraine could blockade Crimea, and more.
Apr 14, 2023
Commentary
Advancing Women's Health Requires Better Evidence
For decades, advances in health and health care have had a bias toward the male body. By shifting the focus of research to women's bodies and building out this base of evidence on women's health, scientists and doctors can improve health outcomes and overall quality of life for women, all while also saving money.
Apr 10, 2023
Report
A Needs Assessment of Women Veterans in Western Pennsylvania: Final Report to Adagio Health
To identify opportunities to expand and enhance Adagio Health's efforts to support women veterans' health and wellness, the authors quantitatively and qualitatively assessed the needs of women veterans in the Adagio Health service area.
Mar 8, 2023
Research Brief
Opportunities to Improve Support for Western Pennsylvania’s Women Veterans
Despite their growing numbers, women who have served in the U.S. military continue to encounter challenges accessing the services and support they need. What national and local programs, services, and supports for veterans are available to meet those needs?
Mar 8, 2023
Journal Article
COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake and Attitudes Among Pregnant and Postpartum Parents
This study aimed to investigate COVID-19 vaccine uptake and reasons for delay or refusal among perinatal parents.
Jan 24, 2023
Commentary
Gender Biases in Health Care: Listen to Women About Their Own Health
More and more information, evidence, and personal stories are emerging suggesting women are not being listened to or believed by health care professionals about their symptoms of physical illness. There is ongoing work in the United Kingdom to improve and integrate women's health services, which creates hope for improvements.
Jan 19, 2023
Periodical
RAND Review: January-February 2023
This issue explores the inadequacies of the current system of space governance; China's presence in the Arctic; abortion in the U.S. post-Dobbs; and the security and technology challenges related to Taiwan's domination of the microchip industry.
Jan 6, 2023
Commentary
Ten Things That Inspired Me in 2022
It would be impossible to capture all the important work that RAND does in a year. But RAND president and CEO Jason Matheny has compiled ten times he was inspired by RAND's efforts to bring insight to some of the biggest policy stories of 2022.
Dec 15, 2022
Journal Article
Seven Features of Safety in Maternity Units: A Framework Based on Multisite Ethnography and Stakeholder Consultation
In this article we aim to characterise features of safety in maternity units and to generate a plain language framework that could be used to guide learning and improvement.
Dec 8, 2022
Report
Societal Impact of Research Funding for Women's Health in Lung Cancer
The authors find that small investments are likely to yield large gains from increasing research funding in lung cancer; investing in women's health research yields benefits above investing in general research.
Nov 1, 2022
Blog
Racism and Patient Safety, Abortion After Dobbs, Homelessness: RAND Weekly Recap
This week, we discuss racism and patient safety, abortion in America after the Dobbs ruling, how to address homelessness in Los Angeles, and more.
Oct 28, 2022
Q&A
Abortion After the Dobbs Decision: Q&A with RAND Researchers
The overturning of Roe v. Wade is likely to disproportionately affect vulnerable populations, including U.S. service women and pregnant women with substance use disorders. And abortion misinformation will likely increase. RAND researchers discuss these issues and potential policy responses.
Oct 25, 2022
Commentary
Privacy Rights Have Changed. Will Data Handling Follow?
Until privacy protection laws are cemented into place, consumer privacy won't be assured unless consumers can effectively take the steps they need to take to protect their data. Tech companies might view this as a burden, but there will likely be profits for those companies that instead see it as an opportunity.
Oct 24, 2022
Report
Managing Urinary Incontinence for Women in Primary Care: Environmental Scan (Base Year)
The authors of this report present an environmental scan of studies that assess the dissemination and implementation of nonsurgical urinary incontinence treatments for women in primary care.
Oct 20, 2022

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Research conducted by

Researcher Spotlight

Stephanie Stockwell

Analyst

Stephanie Stockwell (she/her) is an analyst at RAND Europe focusing on health and wellbeing. Her research interests include lifestyle behaviours such as physical activity and sedentary behaviour, health over the life course with particular interest in child and older adult populations, disease…
Julia Rollison

Director, Social and Behavioral Policy Program

Julia Rollison (she/her) is director, Social and Behavioral Policy Program, and a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. Her research focuses on pressing public health issues as well as health care access and quality, with emphasis on reproductive health and the health care workforce.…

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