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A social identity approach to understanding gender, identity salience and health amongst women
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Date
2025-12
Abstract
Social identities are powerful determinants of health, shaping perception, behaviour, and physiological responses to stress. Much existing research overlooks the role of gender identity or fails to adopt a social psychological perspective to consider how gender impacts women’s health. This thesis addresses this gap by applying the social identity approach to examine how women’s gender identity and broader group memberships influence health-related outcomes, with a focus on exercise intentions and cardiovascular responses to stress. Across three empirical studies, the thesis demonstrates how identity salience and multiple group memberships shape women’s health in both behavioural and physiological domains. Chapter 3 employed two experiments with women runners (Study 1: N = 153; Study 2: N = 236) to test whether salient identity (runner vs. gender) influenced outdoor exercise intentions and feelings of safety. Runner identity increased perceived safety, while gender identity was linked with heightened perceptions of risk. A similar trend was observed for exercise intentions, where women primed with gender identity reported lower likelihood of outdoor exercise than those primed with runner identity. Chapter 4 (N = 96) experimentally manipulated gender versus student identity salience prior to a maths stressor to examine its effect on cardiovascular responses. Women primed with gender identity exhibited significantly higher systolic and diastolic blood pressure reactivity (SBP and DBP, respectively) than those who were primed with their student identity. These findings demonstrate how identity salience can amplify physiological stress responses. Chapter 5 (N ≈ 180–200) used longitudinal secondary data to examine the role of multiple group memberships (MGM) and discrimination attribution in predicting future cardiovascular reactivity. While MGM generally predicted lower heart rate (HR) reactivity, this likely reflected physiological disengagement in a generally blunted sample rather than a protective effect. Moderation analyses revealed that when discrimination was attributed to a single group, higher MGM was associated with more adaptive stress responses (greater HR and DBP reactivity). In contrast, when discrimination was unattributed, higher MGM predicted blunted HR responses, suggesting disengagement.
Together, these findings provide novel evidence that social identities influence women’s health outcomes across perceptual, behavioural, and physiological domains. This thesis extends the social identity approach to health by applying it to physiological responses to stress and highlighting potential conditions under which group memberships may act as a social cure or social curse. Practically, it underscores the importance of considering gender identity, intersectional discrimination, and lived experience in public health. By centring women’s gender identity, this research advances our understanding of the dynamic interplay between social identity, context, and health.
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Peer-reviewed
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University of Limerick
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Skilton_2024_Social.pdf
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Sustainable Development Goals
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Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International