Health And Gender

Health is a gendered concept in Western cultures. Customarily it is associated with strength in men and beauty in women. This gendered concept was transmitted through visual representations of the ideal female and male bodies, and ubiquitous media images resulted in the absorption of universal standards of beauty and health and generalized desires to achieve them. Today, genuine or self-styled experts—from physicians to newspaper columnists to advertisers—offer advice on achieving optimal health. Topics in this collection are wide ranging and include childbirth advice in Victorian Australia and Cold War America, menstruation films, Canadian abortion tourism, the Pap smear, the Body Worlds exhibition, and fat liberation. Masculinity is explored among drunkards in antebellum Philadelphia and family memoirs during the 1980s AIDS epidemic. Seemingly objective public health advisories are shown to be as influenced by commercial interests, class, gender, and other social differentiations as marketing approaches are, and the message presented is mediated to varying degrees by those receiving it. This book will be of interest to scholars in women’s studies, health studies, marketing, media studies, social history and anthropology, and popular culture.

Gender and Health is the first book to examine how men's and women's lives and their physiology contribute to differences in their health. In a thoughtful synthesis of diverse literatures, the authors demonstrate that modern societies' health problems ultimately involve a combination of policies, personal behavior, and choice. The book is designed for researchers, policymakers, and others who seek to understand how the choices of individuals, families, communities, and governments contribute to health. It can inform men and women at each of these levels how to better integrate health implications into their everyday decisions and actions.

This Handbook brings together a groundbreaking collection of chapters that uses a gender lens to explore health, healthcare and health policy in both the Global South and North. Empirical evidence is drawn from a variety of different settings and points to the many ways in which the gendered dimensions of health have become reworked across the globe.

Bringing together diverse approaches and case studies of international health worker migration, Global Migration, Gender, and Health Professional Credentials critically reimagines how we conceptualize the transfer of value embodied in internationally educated health professionals (IEHPs). This volume provides key insights into the economistic and feminist concepts of global value transmission, the complexity of health worker migration, and the gendered and intersectional intricacies involved in the workplace integration of immigrant health care workers. The contributions to this edited collection uncover the multitude of actors who play a role in creating, transmitting, transforming, and utilizing the value embedded in international health migrants.

This book is the first to focus on sex- and gender-based analysis (SGBA) in public health, addressing the dearth of thinking, practice, and publication on SGBA and public health. The Canadian government is a global leader in seeking gender equity and mandating SGBA in federal initiatives, programs, and policies, continuing to advocate for the uptake of SGBA. However, there is differential uptake of SGBA in many fields, and public health is lagging behind. This book analyses the movement toward SGBA in Canada and internationally, highlighting some key examples of public health concern such as HIV/AIDS and tobacco use. An international group of experts in the fields of SGBA, public health, program evaluation, policy development, and research comprise the authorship of the book. Collectively, the team of authors and editors have deep expertise in SGBA and public health nationally and internationally and have published widely in the SGBA literature. Topics explored among the chapters – organized under three thematic content areas: the SGBA terrain in public health, illustrative examples from the field, and the implications of SGBA in public health – include: Sex- and Gender-Based Analyses and Advancing Population Health Beyond “Women’s Cancers”: Sex and Gender in Cancer Health and Care Women, Alcohol and the Public Health Response – Moving Forward from Avoidance, Inattention and Inaction to Gender-Based Design Understanding Pandemics Through a Sex- and Gender-Based Analysis Plus (SGBA+) Lens Sex- and Gender-Based Analysis and the Social Determinants of Health: Public Health, Human Rights and Incarcerated Youth Gender-Transformative Public Health Approaches Sex- and Gender-Based Analysis in Public Health is an important text for graduate-level students and trainees as well as public health practitioners in a variety of disciplines such as health promotion, nursing, health administration, public administration, sociology, political science, gender and women’s studies. The book also is an essential resource for specialists in public health policy, programming, research, and evaluation.

This book provides primary care clinicians, researchers, and educators with a guide that helps facilitate comprehensive, evidenced-based healthcare of women and gender diverse populations. Many primary care training programs in the United States lack formalized training in women’s health, or if they do, the allotted time for teaching is sparse. This book addresses this learning gap with a solid framework for any program or individual interested in learning about or teaching women’s health. It can serve as a quick in-the-clinic reference between patients, or be used to steer curricular efforts in medical training programs, particularly tailored to internal medicine, family medicine, gynecology, nursing, and advanced practice provider programs. Organized to cover essential topics in women’s health and gender based care, this text is divided into eight sections: Foundations of Women's Health and Gender Based Medicine, Gynecologic Health and Disease, Breast Health and Disease, Common Medical Conditions, Chronic Pain Disorders, Mental Health and Trauma, Care of Selected Populations (care of female veterans and gender diverse patients), and Obstetric Medicine. Using the Maintenance of Certification (MOC) and American Board of Internal Medicine blueprints for examination development, authors provide evidence-based reviews with several challenge questions and annotated answers at the end of each chapter. The epidemiology, pathophysiology, evaluation, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of all disease processes are detailed in each chapter. Learning objectives, summary points, certain exam techniques, clinical pearls, diagrams, and images are added to enhance reader’s engagement and understanding of the material. Written by experts in the field, Sex and Gender-Based Women's Health is designed to guide all providers, regardless of training discipline or seniority, through comprehensive outpatient women’s health and gender diverse care.

Health status and the experience of working in health care roles are both strongly shaped by gender and, although there have been attempts to incorporate ‘gender awareness’ in both health and employment policies, the significance of gender in these areas continues to be marginalised within public debates and academic discourses. Taking a social constructionist perspective, Watts considers the ways in which gender impacts upon health in all its elements including access, technology, professionalisation, health promotion and health as an important sector of the labour market. She discusses gender as a developing and diversified category, exploring ideas about masculinity and the fluidity of gender boundaries in determining individual identity. Chapters that follow discuss men’s and women’s health; ideology of gender and health, specifically exploring different social norms and ideas about male and female health and the dominant ideological association between femaleness and caring; working for health with particular focus on the gendered interplay of caring and curing roles; technology and changes to gender, health and healthcare; health promotion as a gendered activity and, finally, the importance of introducing an intersectional approach beyond gender to articulate a deeper understanding of health in a postmodern context. The concluding chapter draws together these themes to underscore the importance of placing gender at the centre of health and health care delivery to fully take account of both the different life and health experiences of men and women and the gendered dimensions of working in health care.

In this innovative collection, leading thinkers in clinical medicine, sociology, epidemiology, kinesiology, education, and public policy reveal how health promotion is failing communities by failing women. Despite a longstanding consensus that social inequalities shape global patterns of illness and opportunities for health, mainstream health promotion frameworks continue to ignore gender at relational, household, community, and state levels. Exploring the ways in which gendered norms affect health and social equity for all human beings, Making It Better invites us to rethink conventional approaches to health promotion and to strive for transformative initiatives and policies. Offering practical tools and evidence-based strategies for moving from gender integration to gender transformation, this anthology is required reading for policymakers, health promotion and healthcare practitioners, researchers, community developers, and social service providers.