Taking stock: geographical perspectives on women and health in Canada

Abstract

The summer of 2000 heralded the announcement of the fourteen Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR)--an announcement that took the women's health research community by surprise because neither sex nor gender was included as a theme in any of the announced institutes. In response, a strong lobbying effort was initiated to put in place a research institute with a clear focus on women's health. A group of leading clinicians, researchers, health care providers, representatives of consumer groups, advocates and policy makers rallied around the call for a Canadian Women's Health Research Institute. The result was the creation of a new institute in CIHR called Gender and Health. This experience illustrates the story of much women's health research in Canada which has been, and remains, unrecognised until fought for. Understood within the broader context of research on women in general, and research on women's health in particular, the CIHR story is no anomaly. Women's stories and experiences remain lacking in most historical accounts of health and illness (see, e.g., McNeill 1974; Verano and Ubelaker 1992; Cook 1998). They are lacking in these sources for the same reasons that women's experiences are lacking in historical records in general: women's voices were not valued enough at the time for their views to be recorded for prosperity. Within the broader, contemporary Canadian research community, targeted research funds for women are also on the decline. Recently, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) announced the cancellation of its only women-based strategic research theme, Women and Change. Reportedly, the cancellation was due to under-use because of declining applications to the program. Questions remain, however, about whether this represents a mainstreaming of women's research initiatives into the larger pool of SSHRC Standard Grants, or whether this simply represents an overall decline in research interest on and for women in Canada (Dupuis 2000). The under-representation of women in influential research positions may be a contributing factor. A study last spring of Canada's ambitious $900 million Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program revealed that women have received only 15 percent of the chairs to date, even though 25 percent of Canada's academic community are women, thus prompting the CRC steering committee to consider requiring universities to provide rationale for gender distributions of nominees for future chairs (Kondro 2002). More interestingly, the discrepancy is most pronounced in the health disciplines falling under CIHR where women have received only 11.5 percent of the Tier l chairs and 20.7 percent of the Tier II chairs (Kondro 2002). From these experiences, we see a recognisable need for the continued vigilance in support of recognition for Canadian research on and by women in general, and women's health in particular. To this end, this issue highlights the new contributions being made by geographers in the area of women and health. This collection evolved from two paper sessions co-sponsored by the Geography of Health & Health Care (GHHCSG) and Women in Geography (CWAG) Specialty Groups and presented at the 49th Annual Canadian Association of Geographers Meeting, held at Brock University in St. Catherine's (2000). Those presentations and the discussions that followed both shed light on current Canadian women's health research in geography and brought renewed interest in the uniquely geographical perspectives that this discipline can bring to research on women and health. This introductory section provides background by way of an overview of women's health research and Canadian geographical contributions, thus providing a context for original research represented in the papers that follow. An Overview of Women's Health Research Women's health is often mistakenly equated with maternal and reproductive health, an area of research that represents only a fraction of women's health concerns. …