Professor, School of Medicine, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada.

Susan Phillips MD is a Professor at Queen’s University’s School of Medicine (Kingston, Canada). Practicing family medicine in Ontario’s remote First Nations communities, downtown Toronto, and Kingston’s Community Health Centre have shown her, firsthand, the link between social circumstances and health. Her research on how life-course experiences shape biology and specifically, on gender and health has been published in numerous journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and Social Science and Medicine. Dr. Phillips has been invited by the WHO, Swedish, Australian, Bosnian, Serbian and Canadian universities and governments to contribute to the integration of gender into medical education, research and policy.

Professor Phillips spoke at the Gender Summit 3 North America 2013 (GS3NA) about "Measuring the Health Effects of Gender” during the Integrating Gender Dimensions into Medical Researcher Training Best Practices Workshop. She explored the nature of gender as a determinant of health and how the effects of gender inequities can be included in health outcomes research that can then shape health planning and policy. As a result, health-affirming policies tend to homogenize groups (e.g., assuming that all women are the same) or target individual behaviors, and do so in a gender-blind fashion rather than addressing structural biases and inequities that undermine those behaviors.