ITC Project

 The Theme for the May 31, 2010 World No Tobacco Day, an annual event led by the World Health Organization, is gender and tobacco with an emphasis on tobacco industry marketing towards women.

The International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project (ITC Project) has released a working paper that examines the link between gender equality, economic development, and female smoking rates. The paper examines the relation between the ratio of female-to-male current smoking rates and an indicator of gender empowerment - the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) - across 74 countries at different stages of the tobacco epidemic.

The paper also asks the question: In countries where women's empowerment is increasing, can such increases in empowerment take place without a corresponding increase in smoking rates among women? Understanding this relationship is critical as it is projected that women's smoking prevalence rates will rise relative to those of men in many low-and-middle income countries where females currently smoke at much lower rates than males.

The findings identify a challenge for countries undergoing economic development and greater gender equality, and highlight the need for evidence based tobacco control policies, particularly in countries where women's smoking rates are low, and women's empowerment is increasing.

The paper is co-authored by Sara C. Hitchman, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo and Geoffrey T. Fong, Ph.D., Founder and Chief Principal Investigator of the ITC Project, Professor of Psychology and Health Studies at the University of Waterloo, and Senior Investigator at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research.

ITC Project Brochure  English version French version

The International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project (the ITC Project) is an international collaboration of tobacco control researchers whose mission is to evaluate the psychosocial and behavioral effects of national-level tobacco control policies throughout the world. The ITC Project consists of parallel annual surveys being conducted in 20 countries, inhabited by over 50% of the world's population, 60% of the world's smokers, and 70% of the world's tobacco users: Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, China, Mexico, Uruguay, New Zealand, France, Germany, Netherlands, Brazil, Bangladesh, Mauritius, Bhutan and India. Additional ITC Surveys are being planned in other countries. All ITC Surveys are designed from the same conceptual framework and methods, and the survey questions are designed to be identical or functionally equivalent in order to allow strong comparisons across countries.

1. Conduct rigorous evaluation of FCTC policies at the level of the individual smoker
2. To understand the causal mechanisms responsible for policy impact-to understand how and why a policy had its impact
3. To actively disseminate research findings not only to researchers, but especially to policymakers, advocates, and the tobacco control community more widely in order to promote strong, evidence-based implementation of the FCTC

The following table presents the ITC surveys conducted in each country by year. The red cells indicate that an ITC survey was conducted in that country in that year. Click here for a copy of the chart.