Origin and goals of the "Gender Symmetry" Workshop

This article provides a brief account of the historical background to the Gender Symmetry Workshop and describes its major goals. The Workshop is a successor to an earlier workshop co-sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute of Justice in 1998, namely the Workshop on Building Data Systems for Monitoring and Responding to Violence Against Women. Some key issues that were left unresolved in that workshop provided the rationale for holding the Gender Symmetry Workshop. The Workshop was designed to cover three topic areas: (1) a typology of violence, (2) measurement issues, and (3) women's use of violence.