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Despite global commitments to achieving gender equality and improving health and well-being for all, quantitative data and methods to precisely estimate the effect of gender norms on health inequities are underdeveloped. Nonetheless, existing global, national, and sub-national data provide key opportunities for testing associations between gender norms and health. Using innovative approaches to analysing proxies for gender norms, we generated evidence that gender norms impact the health of women and men across life stages, health sectors, and world regions. Six case studies demonstrated that: 1) gender norms are complex and may intersect with other social factors to impact health over the life course; 2) early gender-normative influences by parents and peers may have multiple and differing health consequences for girls and boys; 3) non-conformity with, and transgression of, gender norms may be harmful to health, in particular when they trigger negative sanctions; and 4) the impact of gender norms on health can be context-specific, demanding care when designing effective gender-transformative health policies and programs. Limitations of survey-based data are described that resulted in missed opportunities for exploring certain populations and domains. Recommendations for optimising and advancing research on the health impacts of gender norms are made.

ContributorsKH and AR led conceptualisation and drafting of the paper. AD led the study on nurses in Uttar Pradesh, ND the study on accredited social health activists in Uttar Pradesh, HW and JR the study on community health workers and community health worker policy in Sierra Leone, LM, JK, and AR the study on gender parity in the global physician workforce, and KH, YA, and NS the study on selfhelp groups in India. FS and RF-M led development of the case on the nurse from eSwatini. VP, RH, and EBa did the systematic literature review on health systems models. JGS and AR led the systematic review on gender transformative clinical interventions. KH, LM, JK, FS, RF-M, AD, YA, JY, EBl, NB, JGS, and AR did the critical reviews of the literature on gender inequalities and gender norms affecting health and helped draft pieces of those reviews, with consideration of diverse geographic contexts. All authors offered critical inputs and reviews of this work, contributed intellectual and substantive revisions to the writing, and provided final approval of the submitted version.