Gender Equality and International Health Policy Planning

Abstract

The 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, led to increased international efforts to scale up gender mainstreaming across sectors, including in health (UN, 1995). In the health sector gender mainstreaming has multiple objectives. First and foremost, as in other sectors, its goal is to achieve gender equality. Second, its methods and tools aim to identify and address both the harmful ways that gender inequality damages the health of women and girls as well as the ways that the socialization of gender norms, roles and relations influence health behaviours and outcomes of different groups of women and men (Sen et al., 2007). A final objective is to address institutional conditions of the health system and wider society, such as unequal distribution of decision-making authority, that can reinforce patterns of inequality (Ravindran and Kelkar-Khambete, 2008; Walby, 2005). Enabling policy environments or mechanisms for equal participation of women and men can also contribute to health equity and sustainability in the health sector (Theobald et al., 2002) and to agenda-setting. All of these objectives require both technical expertise and political commitment in order to achieve the ultimate goal of gender equality.