Ellen Annandale is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Leicester University. She is particularly interested in the relationship between the sociology of gender, feminist theory and research on gender, health and illness, and is currently writing Feminist Theory and the Sociology of Health and Illness (Routledge, forthcoming). She is the author of The Sociology of Health and Medicine (Polity Press, 1998). Kate Hunt is a Senior Research Scientist at the Medical Research Council's Social and Public Health Sciences Unit at Glasgow University. She is a social scientist whose main interests are in gender and health, and the social construction of gender. Other current research includes inequalities in health (by social class and ethnicity as well as gender), and lay perceptions of inheritance and their influence on health-related behaviours.