In spite of improvements in global health over the 20th century, health inequities are increasing. Mounting evidence suggests that reducing health inequities requires taking action on the social determinants of health (SDOH), which include income, education, employment, political empowerment and other factors. This paper introduces an alternative health education curriculum, developed by the US-based non-profit organization Just Health Action, which teaches critical health literacy as a step towards empowering people to achieve health equity. Critical health literacy is defined as an individual's understanding of the SDOH combined with the skills to take action at both the individual and the community level. Prior to describing our curricular framework, we connect the recommendations of the World Health Organization Commission on the SDOH with the objectives of the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion by arguing that achieving them is reliant on critical health literacy. Then we describe our four-part curricular framework for teaching critical health literacy. Part 1, Knowledge, focuses on teaching the SDOH and the paradigm of health as a human right. Part 2, Compass, refers to activities that help students find their own direction as a social change agent. Part 3, Skills, refers to teaching specific advocacy tools and strategies. Part 4, Action, refers to the development and implementation of an action intended to increase health equity by addressing the SDOH. We describe activities that we use to motivate, engage and empower students to take action on the SDOH and provide examples of advocacy skills students have learned and actions they have implemented.

Violence against women is increasingly seen as a key women's rights issue in India. Some efforts to address it have started to engage men. The current study focuses on the impacts of Men's Action to Stop Violence Against Women (MASVAW), a network of men working on gender-based violence in the state of Uttar Pradesh, in India. The purpose of the study was to determine the extent to which MASVAW activists incorporate gender-equitable attitudes and practices into their own lives and to identify their influence on men around them. The cross-sectional study includes three groups: activists, men living in an area where activists conducted outreach activities and a control group living in an area with no MASVAW activities. Both activists and activist influenced men scored higher on measures of gender-equitable beliefs and practices than controls, suggesting that MASVAW activism is successful. Furthermore, men from the activist influenced group scored higher in gender progressiveness even if they did not have contact with MASVAW themselves, suggesting a diffusion effect of social change. However, there were some areas where the activists had low scores, suggesting need for additional inputs.

In this study, we measure the contribution of immigrants and their descendents to the growth and industrial transformation of the American workforce in the age of mass immigration from 1880 to 1920. The size and selectivity of the immigrant community, as well as their disproportionate residence in large cities, meant they were the mainstay of the American industrial workforce. Immigrants and their children comprised over half of manufacturing workers in 1920, and if the third generation (the grandchildren of immigrants) are included, then more than two-thirds of workers in the manufacturing sector were of recent immigrant stock. Although higher wages and better working conditions might have encouraged more long-resident native-born workers to the industrial economy, the scale and pace of the American industrial revolution might well have slowed. The closing of the door to mass immigration in the 1920s did lead to increased recruitment of native born workers, particularly from the South, to northern industrial cities in the middle decades of the 20th century.

This study is a multiple logistic regression analysis of the relationship between dimensions of women's status and domestic abuse in rural Uttar Pradesh, India, using the 1998-1999 National Family Health Survey (NFHS-2). Findings indicate that the effects of a woman's status on her likelihood of experiencing abuse depend on the social realm within which status operates. Specifically, more "public" dimensions of status are associated with a greater probability of abuse, while "domestic" dimensions are protective. The findings are interpreted in terms of transitioning gender norms in Uttar Pradesh and provide clarity to the literature on the complex relationship between status and abuse.

This article describes a new curriculum developed by Just Health Action (JHA), which teaches the social determinants of health (SDOH) as a strategy to promote health equity. Motivated by the mounting evidence that improvements in health ultimately require taking action on the social, political, and economic determinants of health, JHA has worked since 2004 to teach adolescents critical health literacy, which combines the understanding of the SDOH with skills to take action. This article explains JHA's curricular methodology, provides two case examples of school-based partnerships, and discusses the successes and challenges the authors have experienced in their efforts. JHA's teaching has been enthusiastically received, but its biggest barrier in teaching the SDOH in secondary schools is general lack of awareness of the SDOH and their impact on health outcomes. The authors echo international and national calls to raise awareness of the SDOH through training and education. Incorporating the SDOH into secondary school curriculum first requires a citizenry convinced by its importance who will in turn influence curriculum change. The authors recommend that the SDOH be taught to health professionals in continuing education, as a required course in schools of public health, and in the new initiative to teach public health in undergraduate education.