How does gender inequality affect health disparities between men and women across the life course and in different cultural contexts? Kathryn Yount, Associate Professor in the Hubert Department of Global Health and in the Department of Sociology, has designed an innovative mixed-methods approach to answer this question. Her research is advancing new understandings of social demography and data analysis in global health studies.

Yount, who has been at Emory since 2000, became familiar to Atlanta residents several years ago when she testified in a Gwinnett county court case involving an Ethiopian citizen accused of performing "female genital cutting" (FGC) on his two-year-old daughter. Yount spoke as an expert witness on FGC: her doctoral work had focused on the determinants and health effects of this and other traditional practices in Egypt, where 97% of women are reported to undergo some form of genital cutting. Her testimony at the trial proved influential for later legislation that outlawed the practice in Georgia. She cites the experience as one example of how global health research can have local policy implications, especially for young women in immigrant communities.

Today Yount is gearing up for a two-year study of perceptions and attitudes regarding the treatment of women in Bangladesh, particularly as they relate to domestic violence. During the late decade, several national surveys around the world have identified high rates of domestic violence, and high percentages of women who report that domestic violence against women is justified. Most of this research, however, has been conducted using structured surveys, and Yount suspects that some if the attitudes that are reported in such surveys may be distorted. "Respondents might be giving socially acceptable answers rather than the answers they really believe," she says. "I want to know if indigenous beliefs about women's rights exist in some of these communities, beliefs that simply do not emerge in this kind of structured interview." In collaboration with anthropologist Sidney Schuler at the Academy for Educational Development, Yount will conduct qualitative interviews and survey experiments with Bangladeshi men and women to gain a better understanding of gendered attitudes and perceptions about the treatment of women in local context.

In other studies, Yount is researching how gender inequities in access to resources like schooling, wage work, and health care across the life course affect the long-term health of women and men in places like Guatemala and Egypt. Building on a 2003 data collection project in which she conducted life history interviews with older Egyptian men and women, Yount is working to understand the long-term effects of unequal investment in girls by their parents and caretakers. In partnership with Reynaldo Martorell, Aryeh Stein, Ann Di'Girolamo and other collaborators at Emory, she is developing a parallel set of analyses using longitudinal data from a 35-year cohort study in Guatemala. "There is considerable interest among policy-makers and scholars in how early life investments in health and schooling affect the health of adolescents and young adults," she says. "But we want to show how early life experiences also have long-term, even end-of-life, effects on health and well-being."

Yount also is applying her mixed-methods approach to a new project on neonatal and maternal mortality. Funded by the Global Health Institute at Emory and undertaken in collaboration with Lynn Sibley (PI) in the School of Nursing, she will work with collaborators at several local organizations in Bangladesh to explore two of the major determinants of maternal and neonatal death during childbirth: birth asphyxia and prolonged and obstructed labor. Adapting a qualitative and quantitative event history narrative method that she developed originally to study child illness in Egypt, Yount and her colleagues seek to understand the chain of events that unfold when a woman goes into labor and has an adverse delivery outcome. Local members of the research team will interview surviving mothers and women's relatives to understand the sequence of events that unfold during a birth crisis. At the conclusion of the study, the team will design an educational intervention that enables women to reduce the risk of adverse birth outcomes for themselves and their infants.

As a core faculty member with the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life (MARIAL), Yount also explores contemporary ideas about families around the world. With funding from MARIAL and the National Institutes of Health, through a collaboration with Arland Thornton at the University of Michigan, Yount is undertaking a study that will explore the extent to which men and women in Egypt are exposed to Western ideas about the "modern" family, particularly the egalitarian nuclear couple with few children. The study will assess how men and women react to these ideologies once they have heard about them. "Do men who believe in this conceptualization of a 'modern family' treat their wives differently?" she asks. "Do they invest more in the health and schooling of their daughters?" Using representative samples from two governorates in Egypt, Yount will study 750 Egyptian couples and their children over time. "I also am interested in the intergenerational transmission of ideas about the family," she says, "and whether or how these beliefs alter the relationships, health outcomes, and social and economic outcomes of various family members." She will conduct this project in collaboration with Sohair Mehanna at the Social Research Center, American University in Cairo.

Emory provides a great home base from which she can initiate these research projects. Yount's work crosses disciplines and intersects with several of the university's strategic initiatives, including Implementing Pathways to Global Health, Predictive Health and Society, and Understanding Race and Difference. In her teaching as well as her research, she relishes working in an interdisciplinary setting. Yount's "Gender and Global Health" course draws undergraduate and graduate students from many schools and departments. "One never quite knows what kind of discussion is going to ensue in this seminars, because the students speak very different disciplinary languages," she says. "Every year, I learn something new from them, which makes the course exciting for me, as well." As an affiliated faculty member with the Department of Women's Studies, Yount hopes to forge new research collaborations with Women's Studies faculty and graduate students who are interested in gender and global health.

In the end, Yount's scholarship is fueled by a passion for women's health and by a longstanding commitment to raising awareness about the circumstances of women and their families, especially in poor settings, and to improving women's lives locally and globally. It's a demanding research agenda for any faculty member, but Yount gives the impression she wouldn't have it any other way.