Solving gender gaps in health, what else is missing? <span class="so-article-trans-title" dir="auto"> Translated title: Resolviendo las brechas de género en salud, ¿qué más falta? </span>

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Abstract

In recent years, a great deal of attention has been paid to gender inequities in health. However, while we have a good body of evidence on the impact of gender on the health and vulnerability of women and men, we have not yet been able to generate sufficient evidence on effective interventions that can transform this situation or can influence public health policy making. Only a limited number of educational interventions on gender-sensitivity, gender bias in clinical practice and policies to tackle gender inequalities in health have been formulated, implemented and evaluated. Even in the current pandemic situation caused by SARS-CoV2, we have seen the lack of gender mainstreaming reflected in the global response. This happens even when we have tools that facilitate the formulation and implementation of actions to reduce gender inequities in health. We consider that the current initiatives organized to carry out advocacy activities on gender inequity in health to be very positive. In the same line of these initiatives, we propose that while academic and institutional research on gender and health remains essential, we need to shift the focus towards action. In order to move forward, we need public health researchers questioning what public health practice need to do to address gender inequities and shake structural and social power inequities in order to increase the gender equity in health.

Translated abstract

En los últimos años se ha prestado mucha atención a las desigualdades de género en salud. Si bien hay abundante evidencia sobre el impacto del género en la salud y la vulnerabilidad de mujeres y hombres, aún no se ha podido generar evidencia suficiente sobre intervenciones efectivas que puedan transformar esta situación o que puedan influir en la formulación de políticas de salud pública. Solo se han formulado, implementado y evaluado un número limitado de intervenciones educativas sobre la sensibilidad de género, de intervenciones para reducir el sesgo de género en la práctica clínica y de políticas para abordar las desigualdades de género en la salud. Incluso en la actual situación de pandemia causada por el SARS-CoV2 se ha visto la falta de transversalización de género reflejada en la respuesta global. Esto sucede incluso cuando se cuenta con herramientas que facilitan la formulación y la implementación de acciones para reducir las inequidades de género en salud. Consideramos que las iniciativas actuales para realizar acciones con incidencia sobre la inequidad de género en salud son muy positivas. En esta línea, proponemos que, si bien la investigación académica e institucional sobre género y salud sigue siendo fundamental, hay que cambiar el enfoque hacia la acción. Para avanzar, es necesario que las personas que investigan en salud pública se cuestionen qué deben hacer las prácticas de salud pública para abordar las inequidades de género y hacer tambalear las inequidades estructurales y de poder social con el fin de aumentar la equidad de género en la salud.

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Most cited references 17

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COVID-19: the gendered impacts of the outbreak

Clare Wenham, Julia Smith, Rosemary Morgan (2020)

Policies and public health efforts have not addressed the gendered impacts of disease outbreaks. 1 The response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) appears no different. We are not aware of any gender analysis of the outbreak by global health institutions or governments in affected countries or in preparedness phases. Recognising the extent to which disease outbreaks affect women and men differently is a fundamental step to understanding the primary and secondary effects of a health emergency on different individuals and communities, and for creating effective, equitable policies and interventions. Although sex-disaggregated data for COVID-19 show equal numbers of cases between men and women so far, there seem to be sex differences in mortality and vulnerability to the disease. 2 Emerging evidence suggests that more men than women are dying, potentially due to sex-based immunological 3 or gendered differences, such as patterns and prevalence of smoking. 4 However, current sex-disaggregated data are incomplete, cautioning against early assumptions. Simultaneously, data from the State Council Information Office in China suggest that more than 90% of health-care workers in Hubei province are women, emphasising the gendered nature of the health workforce and the risk that predominantly female health workers incur. 5 The closure of schools to control COVID-19 transmission in China, Hong Kong, Italy, South Korea, and beyond might have a differential effect on women, who provide most of the informal care within families, with the consequence of limiting their work and economic opportunities. Travel restrictions cause financial challenges and uncertainty for mostly female foreign domestic workers, many of whom travel in southeast Asia between the Philippines, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Singapore. 6 Consideration is further needed of the gendered implications of quarantine, such as whether women and men's different physical, cultural, security, and sanitary needs are recognised. Experience from past outbreaks shows the importance of incorporating a gender analysis into preparedness and response efforts to improve the effectiveness of health interventions and promote gender and health equity goals. During the 2014–16 west African outbreak of Ebola virus disease, gendered norms meant that women were more likely to be infected by the virus, given their predominant roles as caregivers within families and as front-line health-care workers. 7 Women were less likely than men to have power in decision making around the outbreak, and their needs were largely unmet. 8 For example, resources for reproductive and sexual health were diverted to the emergency response, contributing to a rise in maternal mortality in a region with one of the highest rates in the world. 9 During the Zika virus outbreak, differences in power between men and women meant that women did not have autonomy over their sexual and reproductive lives, 10 which was compounded by their inadequate access to health care and insufficient financial resources to travel to hospitals for check-ups for their children, despite women doing most of the community vector control activities. 11 Given their front-line interaction with communities, it is concerning that women have not been fully incorporated into global health security surveillance, detection, and prevention mechanisms. Women's socially prescribed care roles typically place them in a prime position to identify trends at the local level that might signal the start of an outbreak and thus improve global health security. Although women should not be further burdened, particularly considering much of their labour during health crises goes underpaid or unpaid, incorporating women's voices and knowledge could be empowering and improve outbreak preparedness and response. Despite the WHO Executive Board recognising the need to include women in decision making for outbreak preparedness and response, 12 there is inadequate women's representation in national and global COVID-19 policy spaces, such as in the White House Coronavirus Task Force. 13 © 2020 Miguel Medina/Contributor/Getty Images 2020 Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active. If the response to disease outbreaks such as COVID-19 is to be effective and not reproduce or perpetuate gender and health inequities, it is important that gender norms, roles, and relations that influence women's and men's differential vulnerability to infection, exposure to pathogens, and treatment received, as well as how these may differ among different groups of women and men, are considered and addressed. We call on governments and global health institutions to consider the sex and gender effects of the COVID-19 outbreak, both direct and indirect, and conduct an analysis of the gendered impacts of the multiple outbreaks, incorporating the voices of women on the front line of the response to COVID-19 and of those most affected by the disease within preparedness and response policies or practices going forward.

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Sex and gender analysis improves science and engineering

Cara Tannenbaum, Robert P. Ellis, Friederike Eyssel … (2019)

The goal of sex and gender analysis is to promote rigorous, reproducible and responsible science. Incorporating sex and gender analysis into experimental design has enabled advancements across many disciplines, such as improved treatment of heart disease and insights into the societal impact of algorithmic bias. Here we discuss the potential for sex and gender analysis to foster scientific discovery, improve experimental efficiency and enable social equality. We provide a roadmap for sex and gender analysis across scientific disciplines and call on researchers, funding agencies, peer-reviewed journals and universities to coordinate efforts to implement robust methods of sex and gender analysis.

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Gender, health and theory: conceptualizing the issue, in local and world perspective.

Raewyn Connell (2012)

Public policy documents on gender and health mostly rely on categorical understandings of gender that are now inadequate. Poststructuralist thought is an advance, but relational theories of gender, treating gender as a multidimensional structure operating in a complex network of institutions, provide the most promising approach to gendered embodiment and its connection with health issues. Examples are discussed in this article. A crucial problem is how to move the analysis beyond local arenas, especially to understand gender on a world scale. A relational approach to this question is proposed, seeing gendered embodiment as interwoven with the violent history of colonialism, the structural violence of contemporary globalization, and the making of gendered institutions on a world scale, including the corporations, professions and state agencies of the health sector. Gender is seen as the active social process that brings reproductive bodies into history, generating health consequences not as a side-effect but in the making of gender itself. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Gac Sanit

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Gac Sanit

Title: Gaceta Sanitaria

Publisher: SESPAS. Published by Elsevier España, S.L.U.

ISSN (Print): 0213-9111

ISSN (Electronic): 1578-1283

Publication date PMC-release: 8 November 2021

Publication date (Print): January-February 2022

Publication date (Electronic): 8 November 2021

Volume: 36

Issue: 1

Pages: 45-47

Affiliations

[a ]Department of Public Health, History of Science and Gynaecology, School of Medicine, University Miguel Hernández, Sant Joan d’Alacant, Alacant, Spain

[b ]CIBER de Epidemiología y Salud Pública (CIBERESP), Spain

Author notes

[* ]Corresponding author.

Article

Publisher Item ID: S0213-9111(21)00177-1

DOI: 10.1016/j.gaceta.2021.10.002

PMC ID: 8754416

PubMed ID: 34763942

SO-VID: ba99408d-66eb-4166-b48d-617db528ae4f

License:

Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.