Hi, Reddit – We’re a team of epidemiologists from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. In our recent study titled, "Unequal depression for equal work? How the wage gap explains gendered disparities in mood disorders,” we used propensity scores to match women and men on age, education, occupation, family composition, years in the workforce, and other factors, and then estimated the effect of income differentials on depression and generalized anxiety disorder. We found that U.S. women whose income was lower than their male matches had nearly 2.5 times the odds of major depression and 4 times the odds of generalized anxiety disorder. Yet when women’s income was greater than their male matches, women’s odds of generalized anxiety disorder or depression were nearly equivalent to men. This finding, published in the journal Social Science & Medicine (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953615302616), may help explain why women are nearly twice as likely to have depression or anxiety than men.

We are...

Lisa Bates, an assistant professor of Epidemiology and social epidemiologist engaged in research on gender and other axes of inequality as they impact health outcomes;

Katherine M. Keyes, an assistant professor of Epidemiology whose research focuses on life-course epidemiology with particular attention to psychiatric disorders;

Jonathan Platt, a second-year doctoral student in Epidemiology who studies the incidence and social causes of gender disparities of mood disorders; and

Seth Prins, a PhD candidate in Epidemiology who studies the political-economic determinants of mental illness, in addition to mental illness and mass incarceration.

We'll be back at 1 pm EST (10 am PST, 6 pm UTC) to answer your questions, Ask Us Anything!

*Edit: Hello! We're online and ready to start answering your questions. We'll be here for about an hour and a half. We're going to answer as many questions as we can, and try to cover a range of issues, from our findings to our methods and theory. *