This seminar will provide an overview of an ongoing international collaborative research project on women’s empowerment through the gender-transformation approach by a research team, who will be the speakers and panelists during this seminar.

The purpose of this research is to examine the empirical evidence of changes in women's role in the health system.

This research project focuses on two major research questions.

• How does the health system perceive women's role?
• How does the gender-transformative approach relate to empowering women as decision-makers, implementers, and evaluators?

This seminar will be a research update and space for discussion. The team will share the initial findings from a review of 1,169 studies. The research team narrowed journal articles based on years of research, title and research focus, geographic information, research questions, research methods, participants, sample size, and the role of women perceived as patients, health care providers, and family caregivers. The initial manual screening was validated by text analysis of titles. By sharing their initial findings, the research team wishes to stimulate questions and comments from the participants of this seminar.

Speakers

Margaret Henning is a Professor in Public Health at Keene State College. Currently, Henning is working as a Senior Learning Advisor for USAID/Ethiopia. Henning earned her master's in health education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and her Ph.D. in Public Health from Oregon State University with a focus on International Health. Henning teaches courses in, Public Health, Women in Health, International Health, Epidemiology, and Social Determinate of Health. This year Henning is working as a Senior Learning Advisor for USAID/Ethiopia. Henning has also completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the T.H Chan Harvard School of Public Health. Most recently Henning completed a Spencer grant and Fulbright Research award while in Zambia. For the Spencer's research, Henning’s research was focused on school re-entry policy for adolescent mothers and the Fulbright award was focused on Community Health Workers and Maternal Child Health. Her research is interdisciplinary and focuses on the problems of mobilizing, allocating, and maintaining limited resources to improve health. Henning has led research in Botswana, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Zambia.

Aya Goto is Professor of Health Information and Epidemiology at Fukushima Medical University (FMU) Center for Integrated Science and Humanities. She completed her medical degree and Ph.D. degree from Yamagata University School of Medicine, and an MPH degree from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and was a Takemi Fellow in International Health at Harvard.  Dr. Goto’s main research interests are reproductive health, parenting support and health literacy. Her translational research has been conducted in close collaboration with local communities in Fukushima and Ho Chi Minh City and is combined with the capacity building of local health care professionals in health information as well as maternal and child health care. Since the Fukushima nuclear accident, Dr. Goto has been working closely with local public health nurses helping them respond appropriately to concerns among parents of small children about elevated background radiation. Recently, she started working with children in disaster-prone Asian countries toward health promotion and community development.

Minah Kang is professor at the Department of Public Administration at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea. Until recently, she served the Korean government as the first female Commissioner of the Board of Audit and Inspection, the Supreme Audit Institution of Korea. She was a committee member of various expert advisory committees, including the Presidential Committee on the 4th Industrial Revolution, the Primary Ministers’ Committee for International Development Cooperation (CIDC), and advisory boards for the Korean government (Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Health and Welfare, Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Since 2018, she is the Korean delegate to the W20, one of the engagement groups to the G20. She published numerous articles in internationally recognized public policy and health policy journals including New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Medical Care, Health Policy, and JAMA. Her research interests are global health and governance, development cooperation policy, M&E framework for ODA, and political analysis of public policy. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Health Systems & Reform and Associate Editor of BMC Health Services Research. She completed a Ph.D. in Health Policy from Harvard University, Masters of Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School and BA from Ewha Womans University

Yanghee Kim is working as a research fellow at the Dept. of Global Cooperation of National Health Insurance Service (NHIS) in Korea. She got her B.S. in Political Science, M.A and Ph.D. degree in Women’s Studies at Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul. She has been engaged in many international development projects in Rao PDR, Ghana, Peru, and Indonesia. She had researched Korean women’s anti-disposable sanitary pads movement from 2017 to 2020. It was published in the title of “My body is the evidence, assess my health: Women’s disposable sanitary pads social health movement in Korea’ at Health Care for Women International in 2021. Her research interests are in social health insurance, gender & health, women’s reproductive health, and development & welfare.

Yoorim Bang is postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Development and Human Security at Ewha Womans University. She received a Ph.D. degree in the Graduate School of International Studies at Ewha Womans University, majoring in development cooperation. Her doctoral dissertation analyzes the effects of gender-sensitive health official development assistance (ODA) projects on women’s health with a focus on the success factors. She involved in various research projects addressing South Korea’s development cooperation especially in the health sector. Her research interests are gender, global health, development cooperation and ODA. She recently serves as one of the expert committee members in the National Council for Sustainable Development in Korea.