In 2005, the World Health Organization recognized gender as a structural driver of inequalities in health [1]. While health patterns unfold throughout the life course, it is during the transitional period of early adolescence, 10–14 years of age, that a gender divide in health begins to emerge with consequences that exacerbate across adolescence and through adulthood [2]. While the original understanding of this divide was mostly rooted in a biomedical conceptualization of gender (often conflated with sex), we have moved toward a biosocial understanding of gender as a sociocultural process that interacts with and regulates the bodies through differential patterns of exposures and practices [3].
