ABSTRACT

A year or so ago while writing a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant application on Black men’s substance use and health in the context of social-structural stressors such as racism, heterosexism, and incarceration, I reached the point where I needed to justify the inclusion of men only. To help craft my argument, I initiated a Google search using the keywords “Office Men’s Health.” It was a quick and fruitless search. No federal Office of Men’s Health exists in the United States. By contrast, a search for “Office Women’s Health” yielded as a top hit—the Office on Women’s Health (OWH; 2018), a bureau established within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 1991 to “coordinate women’s health efforts across HHS and address critical women’s health issues by informing and advancing policies, educating healthcare professionals and consumers, and supporting innovative programs.” Pursuant to this coordination, there are numerous OWHs across the federal government such as at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the NIH, and the Food and Drug Administration. Some, such as NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health (2018), even have extensive collections of information and resources specifically focused on the health of racial/ethnic minority women.