December Salon - Patricia A. Homan December 14, 2022
Salon Topic:
Getting Structural: Why Researching and Measuring Structural Intersectionality, Structural Sexism and Structural Racism Are So Critical for Advancing Health Equity
Patricia A. Homan, PhD
Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the Public Health Program,
Florida State University
Given the dominance of individualistic perspectives in the social and behavioral sciences historically (looking at you, discipline of psychology!), and their influence on health equity research, it is hardly surprising that even most intersectionality research has a decidedly individualistic bent. Enter Dr. Patricia Homan, a sociologist by training, with a clarion call for intersectionality researchers to retreat from this exclusively individual-level emphasis and become more structurally-oriented. In line with her excellent and groundbreaking research on structural sexism in the U.S., and advocacy for more structural intersectional approaches to health equity research, Dr. Homan will discuss her research on structural sexism, why she sees structural intersectionality as an essential “new direction” for research on health disparities and inequities, and the genesis of the term “structural heteropatriarchy” in her research on U.S. women’s birth outcomes.
Patricia Homan is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Public Health Program at Florida State University. She is also an associate of FSU’s Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy and the Center for Demography and Population Health. Her research focuses on developing theory and measurement for structural sexism, structural racism, and other forms of structural injustice, and examining how these forces shape health. Her work has been published in American Sociological Review, Demography, American Journal of Public Health, Health Affairs, Social Forces, Social Science & Medicine, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Health Services Research, The Gerontologist, and The Journals of Gerontology: Series B. Her research has won multiple awards including the 2022 NIH Matilda White Riley Early Stage Investigator Award, the 2022 Early Career Gender Scholar Award from SWS South, the 2021 ASA Sex & Gender Section Distinguished Article Award, and the 2019 Roberta G. Simmons Outstanding Dissertation Award from the ASA Medical Sociology Section.
- Homan, Patricia. 2019. “Structural Sexism and Health in the United States: A New Perspective on Health Inequality and the Gender System.” American Sociological Review 84(3):486–516. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419848723
- Homan, Patricia, Tyson Brown and Brittany King*. 2021 “Structural Intersectionality as a New Direction for Health Disparities Research.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 62(3): 350-370. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221465211032947
- Everett, Bethany, Aubrey Limburg*, Patricia Homan, and Morgan Philbin. 2021. “Structural Heteropatriarchy and Birth Outcomes among Women in the United States.” Demography. 9606030. https://doi.org/10.1215/00703370-9606030