Theoretical Framework

Research on women and CR has shown that women remain under-referred to CR programs (Beckstead, Pezzo, Beckie, Shahraki, Kentner, & Grace, 2013). One of the reasons that was identified as the cause of this is, doctors perceive women to be less likely to benefit from CR compared to their male counterparts, despite having identical indicators (Beckstead et al., 2013). Knowing that there are these gender inequalities in research, the Critical Social Theory (CST) is not used within the research, but it is used to justify the need for this research. A central tenet of CST is that research tends to create and maintain different forms of oppression, one of them being gender oppression (Brown, 2000). This is evident in the under representation of women in cardiac research (American College of Cardiology, 2013). The goal of CST is to create emancipatory processes for those who are being oppressed, and as it has been identified above that women are underrepresented, and under-referred in CR and in cardiac research, this research will seek to overcome these issues by examining women and their outcomes specifically.