Han and Mize 2026 SSR

Han, Bing and Trenton D. Mize. 2026. “Doing gender, doing health: Disentangling the relationship between gender and health lifestyles.” Social Science Research.

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Abstract

Gender plays an important role in health lifestyles. Focusing exclusively on differences between men and women may overlook additional ways gender and health lifestyles are related. Gender operates through multiple dimensions—including identity, presentation, and behavior—each of which may have unique associations with health lifestyles. Adopting a multidimensional gender framework allows us to examine whether these dimensions operate similarly or diverge in their associations with patterned health practices. Using data from Add Health Wave V (N = 11,635), we use a machine-learning-based method to measure gender-typical behavior and identify six distinct health lifestyles through latent class analysis. When modeling all three gender dimensions simultaneously, we find that gender identity and gender presentation, and to a lesser extent, gender-typical behavior, are associated with health lifestyles but in somewhat distinct ways. Men are more likely to belong to Smokers and Athletic lifestyles, whereas masculine presentation is independently associated with greater likelihood of belonging to the Smokers lifestyle and lower likelihood of membership in the Health Conscious class. Feminine presentation is associated with a consistently health-promoting lifestyle. In contrast, lower levels of male-typical behavior are weakly associated with a less comprehensive but still generally healthy lifestyle. Taken together, these findings suggest that different dimensions of gender are not interchangeable: they sometimes operate in parallel but in other cases exhibit distinct patterns of association with health lifestyles.