Question

From a health-promotion perspective, what makes gender a particularly challenging construct?

Answer 1

" Gender equality is more than a goal in itself. It is aprecondition for meeting the challenge of reducing poverty, promoting sustainable development and building good governance."

- Kofi Annan

Men and women have different roles and responsibility, they differ in their biology, position in their family and community. These factors greatly influences the cause,consequences and management of diseases, ill health and the success of health promotion policies and programmes.This is proved by the differences in cause specific mortality and morbidity and exposure to the risk factors. The health promotion interventions should address these differences between gender to be effective. Despite of their biological differences, their access to power is also different. The use of health promotion perspective emphazied more in the areas where there is unequal distribution of power, wealth and risk to health between men and women.

There are various reasons why the gender becomes a challenging construct. Some of the reasons are illustrated below:

• The lack of knowledge about the gender inequalities in health while framing a health promotion interventions, leads to misallocated resources. For example, the magnitude and the health consequences of domestic violence on women are neglected in both research and policy.
• The general assumption that the interventions planned will be equally effective for women like its for men, results in neglected gender issue while planning a health promotion intervention. None of the researches specify the sex of the participants.
• As women is the main caregiver in the family, most of the health promotion activities are targeted towards women. But in many countries where the women have a low status in household, the decision to apply a health promotion interevntion in the family is often affected. This in turn affects the success of the program.
• Accessibility to the various health programmes or services are different among women and men. For example, a needs to take permission from their household members particularly husbands to visit a clinic for health purpose.