Since the 1980s, research on gender disparities in health has grown significantly(Read & Gorman, 2010). Recent studies call for moving beyond individual-level factors and exploring the broader influence of macro-level structural differences. Adopting a comparative perspective, this dissertation investigates the sociocultural contexts of gender disparities in two health outcomes: persistent smoking and depression. It consists of three empirical chapters that shed light on these issues. Chapter 2 explores gender disparities in persistent smoking among older Europeans. It reveals that older European women are more likely to be persistent smokers than men. The chapter also highlights the gendered effects of social determinants of health, with a stronger inverse association between education and persistent smoking among women. Additionally, it uncovers how seemingly gender-neutral tobacco control policies have differential effects on persistent smoking based on gender and socioeconomic status. Chapter 3 extends the investigation to China, examining how sociocultural factors shape persistent smoking among older Chinese adults. In contrast to Europe, Chinese older women exhibit a slightly lower prevalence of persistent smoking than men, possibly due to the gendered norms of smoking in China. Moreover, the results show that overall social participation is associated with increased risks of persistent smoking in China, which differs from patterns observed in Europe. Additionally, the association between social participation and smoking differs across different forms of activity. This chapter highlights that social gradients of health can be context-specific. Chapter 4 combines a life course perspective with an institutional approach to understand the gender gap in depression. The findings demonstrate that women are more vulnerable to low childhood socioeconomic status. Importantly, this gendered vulnerability varies across gender regimes. That is, the gender gap is more pronounced in gender regimes characterized by higher levels of gender inequality (traditional and contradictory regimes), while it is absent in regimes with greater gender equality (dual-earner and market-oriented regimes). Overall, this dissertation contributes to the understanding of gender disparities in health by considering sociocultural contexts and macro-level factors. It emphasizes the importance of these contextual factors in shaping health and highlights the variations in gender disparities across different regions and institutional contexts.

Empirical findings on the negative association between women’s political representation and corruption are mixed and there is no consensus on why such association exists. Some argue that women’s risk aversion characteristic leads female legislators to engage in corruption less to avoid the risks of being caught. Others suggest that female legislators actively mobile against corruption to protect women’s interests. Using the panel data for up to 162 countries from 2002-2015, I first find that after controlling for the time-invariant country-specific heterogeneity, women’s political representation is negatively associated with corruption. Then, using mediation analysis, I find that social spending mediates the suppressing effect of women’s political representation and corruption, thus provide evidence for the women’s interest mechanism.