Shelah S. Bloom
Sc.D., Research Assistant Professor,
Maternal and Child Health
Dr. Bloom's Curriculum Vitae
Dr. Bloom's Personal Home Page
CPC Office: 216 CPC North
CPC Phone Number: (919) 966-7099
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Email: shelah_bloom@unc.edu
Shelah S. Bloom Sc.D., S.M., M.A. is Research Assistant Professor of Maternal and Child Health and Senior Gender Advisor of the MEASURE Evaluation project. Her research interests fall within two signature themes: sexual behavior, contraceptive use, and reproductive health; and population and health policies and programs. Bloom's research focuses on reproductive health outcomes, especially gender effects on maternal health, HIV/AIDS and STIs. In 2012, she wrote Gender and Health Data and Statistics, an annotated guide in collaboration with the WHO. This guide pulls together the range of available tools that program managers and policy-makers can use to access data sources, analytic tools and frameworks on gender and health. In 2008, in collaboration with an international panel of experts, she wrote Violence Against Women and Girls (VAW/G): A Compendium of Monitoring and Evaluation Indicators (Bloom 2008). The first publication of its kind, it is now being used by VAW/G programmatic streams around the world funded by USAID, PEPFAR, and various UN organizations such as WHO. Most of her research has taken place in South Asia, where she has worked for 30 years (e.g., Bloom & Griffiths 2007). Bloom is currently studying the risk of the spread of HIV in North India: examining the effect of gender on married men's risky sexual behavior, HIV stigma among women and men in North India, and how these factors affect HIV programming streams such as Voluntary Counseling and Testing (VCT). Where there is a balance of gender-based power, such as higher autonomy for women and gender-equitable attitudes in men, people are less likely to harbor stigmatizing attitudes that hamper HIV prevention efforts and are more likely to demonstrate knowledge about HIV programming such as VCT. While the effects of gender on health outcomes are clearly documented around the world, little evidence exists on the effects of gender on the performance and impact of health programs. Gender-related monitoring and evaluation is a newly emerging field and global donor organizations are now requiring programs to document how they address gender inequality. Bloom is moving this field forward in several ways. By integrating gender into the ongoing activities on the MEASURE Evaluation project, she is demonstrating how gender can become a tangible, measurable component of programmatic inputs, outputs, and outcomes; capacity building activities aim at providing gender-related monitoring and evaluation skills to both M&E specialists and those working in gender and health related programming; and new evaluations in gender and health show how the integration of gender equality factors change programmatic impact.
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Information updated on 2/28/2013
