Women’s Health in Context: Gender Issues

Broad Perspective on Women’s Health

• Focus on women's health is traditionally narrow, often revolving around reproductive health.
• Important to analyze women’s health in a broader context, considering socio-economic factors and gender relations.

Key Theoretical Frameworks

• Relations of Ruling: Concept by Dorothy Smith; refers to how social processes are shaped by powerful entities, influencing consciousness and practices.
• Awareness that bodies can only be understood within their contextual reality, highlighting gendered relations characterized by inequality.

Historical Context and Changes in Women’s Health

• Birth Control & Abortions: Prior to 1969, it was illegal to provide birth control information or sell methods; abortions were also prohibited.
  • Positive changes stemmed from the women’s health movement, which included various formal and informal groups advocating for women's rights.
  • Movement was diverse without a unified voice, addressing issues from birth control to poverty.
• Impact of Legal Changes: A significant decline in teen pregnancies noted since legislation changed and services expanded, but it cannot be solely attributed to abortion law changes because abortion rates began declining prior to these adjustments.
  • Factors like new services and better education play crucial roles, though access to these services is limited in specific communities (e.g., rural, impoverished, unhoused, Indigenous).
• Paid Maternity Leave: Rights to paid maternity leave also benefit women’s rights, although only 2/3rds of women receive some form of parental benefits, and women with disabilities often do not qualify due to interrupted work patterns.

Midwifery and Pregnancy Care

• Advocacy for midwifery led to publicly funded services in many areas, reframing pregnancy as a health issue rather than an illness.
• Midwives provide unique support from early pregnancy through post-birth.

Understanding Health Consequences of Structural Sexism

• Emergence of Structural Sexism Analysis combines health inequality research with feminist scholarship.
• Multilevel Gender Inequality: Gender understood as a multilevel system of inequality:
  • Macro-level: Norms and distribution of resources across institutions, such as underrepresentation of women in legislative roles and gender wage gaps.
  • Meso-level: Interpersonal interactions and organizational practices that recreate unequal gender systems within families, workplaces, and communities.
  • Micro-level: Internalized identities, beliefs, and practices shaped by socialization (e.g., gender roles such as women as homemakers).

Connections Between Structural Sexism and Health

• Ecosocial Theory: Explains how oppressive social relations create unequal living and working conditions, leading to embodied inequalities.
  • Structural sexism harms all genders—men’s health is negatively impacted as well.
• Empowering women correlates with increased investment in healthcare, public health, and education.

Research Insights on Health Outcomes

• Structural sexism linked to several health outcomes:
  • Chronic conditions, self-rated health, physical functioning, barriers to healthcare access, and communication with providers.
  • There is a need for further research to explore more health outcomes associated with structural sexism, particularly in maternal and infant health, mental health, and life expectancy.

Explaining Health Inequality: Various Perspectives

• Individualist explanations often focus on biomedical and behavioral factors, simplifying complex health issues into genetic predispositions.

  • Biomedical Explanation: Sees health inequalities as rooted in biological deficiencies; criticized for lacking empirical support.
  • Behavioral Explanation: Attributes health outcomes to individual lifestyle choices; overlooks broader social factors leading to unhealthy behaviors, prone to victim-blaming.

• Materialist/Neo-Materialist Explanation: Focuses on how resource access and societal organization influence health, employing Marxist and Weberian frameworks.

  • Recognizes how social status and living conditions impact health through exposure to opportunities and risks.

• Psychosocial Explanation: Highlights how social exclusion and hierarchies affect well-being.

  • Factors such as agency, individual connections, and community cohesion greatly influence health outcomes.

Intersectionality and Gendered Health Experiences

• Individual behaviors and health are contextualized within social determinants affecting diverse populations.
• Intersectional aspects of inequality highlight how race, gender, and social class affect health interactions.

Gender, Education, and Health Status

• Education and employment significantly affect health outcomes; lower education levels correlate with higher mortality rates.
  • Increased education may lead to better health opportunities, yet gender disparities persist, with women often enteringlower status roles despite educational attainment.
• Wage Gap: The median hourly wage for women stands at 84 cents to each dollar earned by men, with women often congregated in lower-paying professions.

Health Disparities Among Genders

• Women typically face a higher prevalence of chronic conditions, whereas men experience more acute conditions.
• Life expectancy as of 2023 indicates a gap: men at 79.51 years and women at 83.89 years.
• Disparities in health reporting and prevalence of conditions between genders:
  • Women report chronic illnesses such as arthritis, dementia, and autoimmune diseases more frequently than men.
  • Men face life-threatening diseases related to cardiovascular factors and risk-taking behaviors, contributing to higher mortality rates.

Health and Gender Diverse Populations

• Transgender and non-binary individuals experience significant health disparities due to stigma, discrimination, and lack of research.
  • Common barriers include neglect by healthcare providers and lack of support for broader health needs.

Example: Respiratory Health

• Research shows women who frequently use cleaning products suffer from diminished lung function equivalent to long-term smokers.
  • Contextual factors like occupational hazards contribute to gendered health outcomes.

Conclusion

• Overall patterns suggest that social determinants such as gender roles and economic status heavily influence health outcomes.
• Awareness of these intersections is vital for improving health equity and policymaking.