Debates in Mental Health The intersection of gender and resilience Introduction

A gendered understanding of resilience is vital to the development of gender sensitive research tools and effective practices to optimize opportunities to promote mental health and well-being. This paper reviews the evolution of the conceptualization of resilience and similar psychological constructs and argues that current measures of resilience are not gender sensitive. We also argue that women typically score lower on measures of resilience compared to men because existing conceptualizations of resilience do not reflect the ways that gender roles, social expectations, perceptions and environmental factors interact to differentially shape women’s and men’s experiences and their responses to adversity. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of incorporating gender into the conceptualization and measurement of resilience and offer strategies to improve gender sensitivity into characterizations of resilience and its measurement to generate relevant evidence-informed interventions to promote men’s and women’s well-being. From the Latin word resilientia, resilience refers to the ‘action of rebounding’ or ‘the power of resuming an original shape or position after compression’ (Oxford English Dictionary 2015). In the social science literature, resilience has variously been defined as good developmental outcomes despite high risk status; sustained competence under stress; and recovery from trauma (Werner 1995). Although resilience has been studied in diverse disciplines including ecology (Holling 1973), economics (Levin et al. 1998), developmental psychology (Werner & Smith 1982, 1992, 2001, Masten 1994), addictions (Johnson & Wiechelt 2004) and psychiatry (Rutter 1987, 2013b) for most of a century, there is still debate concerning its nature and measurement. Beginning in the early 1970s, studies of resilience evolved in four waves (Masten & Obradovic 2006, Masten 2007, Lee et al. 2012, Daskalakis et al. 2013, O’Dougherty-Wright et al. 2013). The first wave focused on identifying individual traits or characteristics of so-called invulnerable (Anthony 1974, Garmezy 1974) or invincible (Werner & Smith 1982) children and adolescents who remained well despite exposure to significant risks. Employing a systems perspective, the next wave of studies examined potential mediating and moderating processes of adaptation to stress that purportedly give rise to resilience (Masten & Coatsworth 1998, Wyman et al. 1999, Luthar & Cicchetti 2000, Luthar et al. 2000, Masten 2001, Olsson et al. 2003, Yates et al. 2003). The third wave of resilience research sought ways to prevent untoward outcomes through targeted interventions to promote resilience among individuals deemed to be at risk (Wait & Richardson 2004, Steinhardt & Dolbier 2008, Loprinzi et al. 2011). Finally, the fourth and current wave of resilience research focuses on multi-level processes linking gene expression, neurobiological adaptation, brain development, behaviour and context (Kim-Cohen et al. 2004, Russo et al. 2012, Rutten et al. 2013). More recently, the construct of resilience has broadened to include health and well-being across the lifespan (Zautra et al. 2010a) and research has established positive associations between resilience with health. Nurse researchers have studied resilience in various contexts, including physical illness (West et al. 2011, Edward 2013, Yang et al. 2014); mental illness (Edward 2005, Edward et al. 2009, Zauszniewski & Bekhet 2010, Bekhet et al. 2012, Mealer et al. 2012); nursing education (Jackson et al. 2011, Taylor & Reyes 2012, Thomas et al. 2012, Stephens 2013); and workplace and organizational settings (Gillespie et al. 2007, Jackson et al. 2007, Manzano Garc ıa & Ayala Calvo 2012, McDonald et al. 2013, Zander et al. 2013). Despite its ongoing evolution as a construct, resilience does not yet have a singular theoretical base, which poses significant methodological challenges when it is the focus of studies in human populations. One major challenge is the lack of