Heidi Siller

• Dr. rer.nat
• Assistant professor at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt

This anthology brings together a series of contributions that deal with the topics of migration, gender and sexuality from various disciplinary and methodological perspectives. The contributions shed light on both historical and current phenomena and focus on the intertwining of power, identity and political action. They illustrate from different p...

Frauen erfahren Gewalt in der Familie und Partnerschaft auch in der Schwangerschaft. Hebammen können einen wichtigen Beitrag in der Prävention und Intervention von Gewalt gegen Schwangere und Mütter leisten und an entsprechende Beratungsangebote verweisen. Eine Studie zeigt, welche Herausforderungen Beratungseinrichtung bei der Betreuung von Frauen...

The COVID-19 crisis caused extensive mental health strains. Sense of coherence (SOC) is considered a protective factor for mental health in crisis that might also be decisive during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the mechanisms are not yet well understood. Using longitudinal survey data of 117 Austrian university students collected in 2020, we tested b...

Throughout the pandemic, the media and scholars have widely discussed increasing social inequality and thereby publicly pointed to often hidden and neglected forms of inequality. However, the “newly” arisen awareness has not yet been put into action to reduce this inequality. Dealing with social inequality implies exploring and confronting social p...

The global crises of climate change and of the COVID-19 pandemic are straining young peoples’ mental health and their mitigation behaviours. We surveyed German-speaking university students aged 18 to 30 years on their negative emotions regarding both crises repeatedly before and during the COVID-19 crisis. Different emotional patterns emerged for c...

Background: The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted the daily life of girls and boys worldwide. Methods: This online study explored the effects of Covid-19 containment measures on Austrian and Italian children’s mental health (threat experience, anxiety, trauma symptoms). Data was collected at three measurement time points (June 2020, December 2020, Ju...

Numerous measures were implemented to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Adhering to these measures as well as getting vaccinated is associated with subjective costs and benefits. Since young people like university students largely feel less vulnerable to the virus, other costs and benefits than health might be more decisive for them. This article comb...

An intersectional and reflexive approach is vital in researching violence against women (VAW). It offers insights into researcher–participant relations, the research design and process, and the collection and analysis of data. Furthermore, it illuminates potential blind spots due to, for example, socialisation, values, or beliefs. Particularly in V...

Aim: The Austrian Competence Level Catalogue for Medical Skills clearly states the importance of teaching communicative and social competence in the different subject areas of undergraduate medical and dental education. This paper aims to present an overview of the academic courses at the Medical University of Innsbruck that explicitly address the...

Background: Experiencing interpersonal violence and disclosing this experience to physicians can be associated with fear, shame, denial or emotional turmoil. Expressions of such feelings additionally conflict with masculine gender role ideologies and may be experienced as masculine gender role conflict. Masculine gender role conflict is often asso...

Background Psychological violence is a persistent issue in academic medicine and affects the health and safety of health care workers. This violence is also debated as part of medical culture. Third parties, persons learning about violations after it happened, may provide an understanding of the interplay between gender and psychological violence....

Violence against women (VAW) affects pregnancy, birthing, and puerperium. In this sense, domestic violence (DV) or intimate partner violence (IPV) may increase during pregnancy, sexual child abuse may affect the birthing process, and obstetric violence may occur during birthing. Thus, consideration of violence during pregnancy and puerperium is ess...

Background: Sex and gender are social categories of diversity. Diversity can be perceived with an intersectional framework as it demonstrates the intersecting categories that might contribute to oppression, inequality, power and privilege. This article focused on what aspects were considered in diversity training programmes for health professions a...

Violence has many forms. One form of violence relates to auto-aggression, which includes suicide attempts and suicide itself. In this narrative review we focus on adolescent suicide and how school staff and students can be supported after such an event. Adolescent suicide endangers the wellbeing of all groups involved in a school context (teachers,...

Background: Highly adverse events can shatter fundamental assumptions about one’s self and the expected course of life actuating a process of adjustment regarding new appraisals. This struggle in the aftermath of adversity might yield posttraumatic growth (PTG), which refers to positive transformation within the person. PTG is a concept that has be...

Studies have continuously shown that fewer women than men achieve leadership positions in academic medicine. In the current study we explored gender differences in clinical position among academic physicians at three university hospitals, each in a different European country. These countries, Sweden, the Netherlands and Austria, differ in terms of...

Introduction The quantity and quality of education in the field of human sexuality vary greatly in medical education programs in the United States and Europe. Aim The current state of medical school education with regard to human sexuality was assessed at an Austrian medical university. Methods Self-constructed questionnaires and the Beliefs Abou...

We assessed medical students’ opinion of affirmative action programs (AAPs), perception of gender equality and discrimination. 276 medical students (56.2% female) participated. Women considered AAPs to be more important than did men. Most women (62.6%) and men (71.9%) received equal treatment, but significantly more women (22.6%) than men (11.6%) e...

The Gender Role Conflict Scale – Short Form (GRCS-SF) assesses a person’s masculine gender role conflict. Masculine gender role conflict results when a person experiences discomfort showing a certain behavior because it is in conflict with masculine norms. The aim of the study was to test the questionnaire’s psychometric properties in an Austrian s...

Masculine norms are in part defined by sexual functioning. However, adherence to masculine norms may at the same time hinder men’s willingness to obtain help when problems involving sexual functioning arise. The current study analyzed the association between gender role conflict and the prevalence of self-reported sexual dysfunction or men’s expect...

Existential Pedagogy (EP) derives from existential analysis and logotherapy developed by Viktor Frankl and Alfried Längle in the tradition of existential philosophy and phenomenology. This study investigated how EP influences pedagogues' and teachers' attitudes and teaching. Four focus groups with a total of 12 persons each were conducted in an ele...

In this study we explored whether attendance at lectures on Gender Medicine, students’ gender or university affiliation influenced students’ gender awareness in medicine. We recruited 483 students (352 women/131 men) of medicine, allied health profession with focus on patient contact and allied health profession students with focus on laboratory wo...

Background Mistreatment of medical students during medical education is a widespread concern. Studies have shown that medical students report the most mistreatment compared to students of other study programs and that the prevalence of mistreatment peaks during clinical training. For this reason, a study was conducted to assess prevalence of mistre...

Women's Health is closely tied to sexuality. In the European context the European Women's Rights Movement fought for women's sexual rights and the right of women to self-determination over a woman's own body. However, there appears to still be an ongoing struggle to have such rights (e.g. abortion) reflected in legislation. In response to the artic...

The study focuses on psychosocial functioning of female Turkish immigrants in Austria with recurrent depressive disorder participating in self-help groups. Self-help groups guided by group leaders of Turkish descent should increase autonomy in participants, providing the opportunity to follow their ethnic health beliefs. Turkish immigrant women (n...

The focus of this chapter is on the support and the challenges experienced by female physicians in the formerly male-dominated medical profession. This study was part of a project investigating physicians at university hospitals in seven European countries: 111 physicians (44 women, 67 men) from Austria participated in the study. It examined how wo...

The predicted doctors’ shortage in Austria and the increasing feminisation of the medical profession are aspects of a passionate debate on gender inequality in medical careers and particularly on sufficient medical care in Austria. Therefore, this review summarises main findings on gender inequality in medical careers in Austria using an intersecti...

Over the last few decades the number of female students enrolling to study medicine has been constantly rising (e.g. Hamel et al. 2006: 310; Buckley et al. 2000: 283; Crompton/Le Feuvre 2003: 38-43; Nonnemaker 2000: 400-401). However, barriers for women in medicine still exist and are reflected by the smaller numbers of women in higher positions (H...

Lay counsellors provide valuable psychosocial support in many different circumstances, such as manning telephone helplines for cancer patients, assisting people after crisis events or giving focused support to refugees or other vulnerable groups. This paper describes the process that a consortium of four humanitarian organisations followed to devel...

Gender medicine, which takes a differentiated look at human beings as individuals and aims to provide targeted, gender-specific medical care, is slowly gaining recognition and acceptance. Nevertheless, this medical science that cuts across all medical disciplines has been only marginally incorporated into medical education curricula. The authors wi...

The aim of this article is to depict challenges and possibilities of the term resilience. The effective methods to promote resilience after traumatic events are discussed on the basis of a case example. One problematic aspect of the definition is the description of resilience as individual and innate trait. In contrast to this individualistic appro...