Gender and Individual Health Choices

Abstract

In Chapters 3 through 5 we explored the myriad ways in which larger social units including policy regimes, communities, families, and workplaces make decisions and establish policies and practices that structure men's and women's opportunities for pursuing health. In Chapter 2 we introduced the schematic framework of constrained choice Figure 2.2 to depict the various decision levels that influence men's and women's lives and individual choices. The diagram suggests that the decisions and actions at each of these levels are linked and that collectively they can impinge on men's and women's options over the course of their lives. One purpose of the diagram is to illustrate what is missing in explanations of gender differences and to emphasize that the connections between broader social contexts and individual choices are rarely transparent, and thus health consequences of prior personal and government decisions are often underestimated and frequently overlooked. The bottom of the diagram shows how the interaction between individual health behavior choices and biological processes can lead to subsequent gender differences in health outcomes. However, the linear form of the process displayed in the heuristic diagram oversimplifies a very complex dynamic and is not intended to imply there are known direct links between specific constraints at various levels and health behavior choices and biological processes. Although men's and women's life choices are constrained in ways that can lead to the gender and health differences discussed in Chapters 1 and 3, few if any researchers have attempted to marshal the data needed either to specify those connections or to clarify the role of biological processes in this dynamic.