Women who experience traumatic events are at higher risk for mental health problems compared to men; however gaps remain in our understanding of this disparity. criteria included current psychosis suicidal or homicidal thoughts history of suicidal attempt or psychiatric hospitalization in the past year or substance use in the 24 hours prior to the screening interview. Participants were recruited prior to receiving any type of mental health treatment and received a $10 gift card to a local store for their participation. Of the 215 people who responded to the flyer and were screened for the study 14.4% did not meet inclusion or exclusion criteria and 85.6% met eligibility criteria and consented to participate. Two trained and supervised graduate students pursuing their master’s degree in marriage and family therapy gave participants the self-report questionnaires and were in the room and available for questions during administration of the questionnaires. Among the 181 completers 170 (93.9%) provided sufficient data on the variables of interest and made up the analytic sample for this report. Instruments Indicators of social oppression were measured using a history form and BMS-777607 included questions related to gender race and ethnicity level of education (some high school or less BMS-777607 or high school degree or higher) and annual income level (< $14 999 or > $15 0 The history form was also used to measure age (obtained in years). Participants self-identified their race or ethnicity in one of six categories: White Black Hispanic Asian Native American or other. Participants who self-identified as Asian other or more than one race or ethnicity (= 11) were excluded from the study because the sample sizes for these racial RAB25 and ethnic groups were not large enough to examine differences statistically or make meaningful comparisons. Thus the final BMS-777607 sample consisted of Black White and Hispanic groups of individuals. The Stressful Life Events Screening Questionnaire (Goodman Corcoran Turner Yuan & Green 1998 is a 13-item BMS-777607 self-report screening measure designed to assess lifetime exposure to a variety of traumatic events. Participants are asked whether they have experienced each of 11 events and two “catch-all” experiences. For this study we identified both the type of trauma experienced and the number of traumas reported by the participant for 11 events and BMS-777607 we excluded the “catch-all” experiences. The PTSD Checklist-Civilian version (Weathers Litz Herman Huska & Keane 1993 is a 17-item self-report PTSD symptom instrument that has been shown to have good internal consistency strong correlations with other PTSD scales and high diagnostic efficiency (Weathers et al. 1993 Respondents were asked to reflect on their most distressing traumatic event and rate the extent to which they have been bothered by each symptom using a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (scores using normative data from community samples (Cronbach’s α = .93). scores of 63 or greater are indicative of clinical “caseness” (Derogatis 2001 Zabora et al. 2001 The Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7; Spitzer Kroenke Williams & L?we 2006 is a 7-item brief screening measure of GAD that has good internal consistency and test-retest reliability. Response options are and GAD-7 scores range from 0 BMS-777607 to 21 and reflect anxiety severity (Cronbach’s α = .87); however a diagnostic cutoff of 10 or greater was used in this study to indicate probable GAD (Spitzer et al. 2006 Analytic Strategy Chi-square tests for comparing categorical variables and tests for comparing means were conducted to assess gender associations with demographic characteristics and clinical characteristics. The prevalence of probable PTSD GAD and depression was calculated for each gender. Demographic characteristics that differed significantly by gender were included as covariates in multivariate models examining the relationship of gender to exposure to various traumatic events as well as probable PTSD GAD and depression. Binary logistic regression was conducted to determine the likelihood of exposure to each trauma variable with male gender serving as the reference category. To isolate the association between gender and each trauma variable we also ran these regressions with covariates to reduce confounding. Binary logistic regression was also used to predict the likelihood of probable PTSD GAD or depression for men versus women with odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence.