Women's Agenda Research Articles

Agenda for women's health research. Improving women's musculoskeletal health.

Increased attention and resources focused on women's health during the past decade have resulted in new offices, policies, and programs of the Federal government. The Office of Research on Women's Health, established by the National Institutes of Health in 1990, is a focal point for all National Institutes of Health-supported efforts to improve women's health through biomedical and behavioral research. The Office of Research on Women's Health ensures women's appropriate inclusion in research studies supported by the National Institutes of Health. Through the development of a comprehensive agenda for research on women's health, the Office of Research on Women's Health encourages the consideration of gender issues and gender differences in health and disease in research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. The importance of research to study and improve women's musculoskeletal health has become increasingly recognized. Clinicians, researchers, and representatives of professional and advocacy organizations concerned with women's musculoskeletal health participated in the development of the initial research agenda on women's health in 1991 and participated in the meetings to update and revise the agenda in 1996 and 1997. As a result of meetings convened to review and revise the agenda on women's health for the twenty-first century, many recommendations for additional research on women's musculoskeletal health have been developed and now are being implemented across the National Institutes of Health.

A Woman at the Quirinal? Thanks, But No Thanks

The need for the political empowerment of women, and the role played by the media in both promoting and hindering it are well-known problems. A new opportunity to consider these problems as regards the Italian case was afforded by the 1999 presidential election. During that selection process, the proposal to appoint a woman as head of the nation was, for the first time, brought into the arena for debate. Neither of the two women who were candidates – European Commissioner Emma Bonino and Minister of the Interior Rosa Russo Jervolino – were elected. Using the `public arenas model' and the concept of `framing', the article explores the rise and fall of the two female candidatures by highlighting the limits in the social construction of the women's agenda. Considered from this point of view, the campaign offers an interesting case study in order to better understand the mechanisms of gender exclusion.

The long view: how genetic discoveries will aid healthcare reform.

This article addresses social and ethical priorities on the agenda for women's health research in the next century. Specifically, the relevance of genetic discoveries for healthcare reform and why both topics ought to be among these priorities are discussed. If the present gap between diagnosis and treatment of genetic diseases could be bridged, especially in such common diseases as cancer and heart disease, arguments for universal access to healthcare would be vastly strengthened. Important scientific and ethical problems are involved in bridging the gap, including volatile issues of research with human embryos and fetuses. Other issues deserve high priority on the women's health research agenda: adequate funding for biomedical research, maintaining an equitable number of women in clinical trials, and creating a knowledge base in gender-based biology. Progress in genetic research is clearly relevant to women's health for understanding and treating common diseases, as well as for reproductive decisions. Until recently, genetic services have been aimed exclusively at reproductive choices, including counseling, prenatal diagnosis, and carrier screening. However, the meaning of the term needs to be vastly broadened to include the uses of genetic information in mainstream medicine. Through genetic testing and DNA technology, it will be increasingly possible for physicians to have access to family history and a reliable profile of each patient's genetic health risks. Drugs will be designed that will be responsive to individual genetic variability and risks for disease. If scientific and ethical obstacles are overcome, there may also be effective human gene therapy to correct mutations and prevent lifelong harm. In my view, linking the agenda for women's health research with the unfinished social task of ensuring access to adequate primary and preventive care, which foreseeably will include genetic services and human gene therapy, strengthens the agenda and promotes solidarity with the needs of the majority of Americans. This link will help to prevent political and moral isolation of women's health research.

Candidate gender and voting in the 1997 British general election: Did labour Quotas Matter?

The proportion of women MPs elected in the 1997 British general election reached an historic high of 18.2 per cent, the vast majority from the victorious Labour Party. The large increase in the proportion of women Labour MPs was partly due to the policy of establishing women‐only shortlists for winnable seats. This paper examines the distribution of women candidates in the election and analyses the factors that affected the votes they attracted. The results show that Labour women selected on the women‐only shortlists attracted significantly more votes than women nominated on open shortlists. This was mainly a consequence of their selection for marginal seats, but the greater organisational effort that was concentrated on those seats was also an important factor. Overall, there was no evidence that voters discriminated against women candidates in the election, regardless of party and regardless of how they were selected. The large number of women MPs raises issues concerning the formulation and articulation of a distinctive women's policy agenda at Westminster.

International Environmental Health: Priorities from Huairou

Between August 30 and September 8, 1995, 38,000 women and several hundred men met in Huairou, China, to discuss the global status of women and to lobby for specific wording in the Agenda for Women that was being finalized in Beijing as part of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. This article has two main objectives. The first objective is to summarize the priority concerns identified in Huairou that are related to international environmental health, especially concerns related to women. The second objective is to provide the rationale and documentation that support including these topics as part of professional education and practice in environmental health in the United States. It is hoped that this discussion will aid environmental health professionals in better appreciating the connection between global environmental health problems and local problems and the applicability of gender-relevant environmental health concerns to local programming, policies, and infrastructure.

Disabled Women and Reproductive Rights

ABSTRACT Both the women's and disability rights movements have paid scant attention to the concerns of disabled women, especially involving sexuality, reproductive freedom and mothering. Although their concerns may seem opposite of the women's movement's primary agenda, they are based on the same position: women must not be defined solely by biological characteristics and have the right to make decisions about their bodies and lives. Disabled feminists often support 'reproductive rights', but also have different perspectives on abortion and reproductive technologies than non-disabled feminists. The literature indicates that the reproductive rights of disabled women are constrained by: the assumption that disabled women are asexual; lack of reproductive health care, contraception, and sexuality information; and, social resistance to reproduction and mothering among disabled women. Disabled women are at risk for a range of undesirable outcomes, including coercive sterilization, abortion or loss of child custody.

Stressing a women's agenda. Women of three European sectors define their needs

Women are inadequately represented in the decision-making structures of trade unions, in their European representative organisations and hence also in the European Social Dialogue. The article describes a series of innovatory workshops mounted in Brussels in the summer of 1995, bringing together women grassroots activists of the automobile components manufacturing sector, the railways, and industrial cleaning. The participants generated a comparison of the employment of women in different European member states and worked towards a women's collective bargaining and policy agenda for their different sectors. Practical steps towards gender democracy in the union structures were emphasised, for without them a women's agenda was unlikely to be effectively pursued.

Jordanian Islamists and the agenda for women: between discourse and practice

The resurgent Islamist movement in Jordan2 presents itself as a movement with a clear vision of what constitutes a society based on Islamic principles. Islamist activism and institution-building projects are presented as part of a grand strategy for the reconstruction of an Islamic society and the repossession of an Islamic heritage long denied to the Muslims due to colonialism and the alienation of ordinary Muslims from their own religion and traditions. Can we indeed identify such a coherent Islamist project in Jordan today? An examination of Islamist discourse and practice reveals that in Jordan, as in most other Arab countries, the Islamists have yet to elucidate a consistent and coherent societal project. What we witness is the process of constructing an Islamist agenda. As can be expected from an experiment in the making, we find varying degrees of inconsistency and dissonance both at the level of discourse and practice, and more important, between discourse and practice. This lack of coherence can be attributed to several factors. First, and on the political level, the Islamist movement operates in a political field which has undergone some important changes since the launching of the state's democracy campaign at the end of the 1980s. The campaign jettisoned the Ikhwan into a political field for which they were not fully prepared. While the 'modern' political concepts such as democracy, political pluralism, and freedom of thought and expression were easily incorporated into the vocabulary of the nationalist, liberal and leftist parties, they presented a problem to the Ikhwan. How were they to reconcile these concepts, products of secular Western culture, with Islamic political principles such as shura and ta'a and with their own traditional formulations of the ideal polity? While the Ikhwan have embraced the new concepts enthusiastically in their official discourse, they have yet to resolve the many thorny questions which inevitably arise in the world of practice when the new abstract notions come up against long-held beliefs and ingrained practices. Second, the Ikhwan are faced with a range of constraints imposed upon them by interests and forces external to the movement. Primary among these is the state, which, despite the close relations between the

In Search of a New Economic Order: Women's Agenda for the Next Millennium

Economic issues have become an important part of the agenda of women's organizations and feminist study worldwide. At the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) Forum of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Huairou, China, many workshops focused on such issues as globalization, structural adjustment, economic transition from planned economies, the feminization of poverty, women's employment and unemployment, property rights, and women's access to credit. Economic issues were also discussed in connection with other panels, such as trafficking in women, environmental degradation, access to adequate healthcare and education, and political participation. Although women in Huairou disagreed about many issues, there appeared to be nearly universal agreement that women are harmed by the laissez-faire economic policies that are sweeping the world. The purpose of the official UN conference was to agree on the Platform for Action, which would set guidelines for improving the status of women and girls and promoting equality. Most of the wording, however, had been agreed upon at preliminary meetings, and only language that had been placed in brackets was open for discussion. Thus, it was too late for many women not familiar with the process to add issues they considered important. The organization of NGOs attending the official UN conference, on the other hand, was relatively informal and decentralized. A coordinating body was set up to provide information, and caucuses were set up to address particular issues. The Economic Justice Caucus was unanimous in its condemnation

Engendering world conferences: the international women's movement and the United Nations.

This article gives a brief history of how women's groups internationally have shaped UN and World Conferences for Women, the changes in the relationship between women's nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the UN over time, and effective strategies for putting the women's agenda on international agendas. The article focuses on three recent UN conferences: the Rio conference on the environment, the Vienna conference on human rights, and the Cairo conference on population. The UN Decade for Women reshaped the international women's movement by including new players and by increasing the number and types of women's groups, particularly in developing countries. Women's NGOs learned how to operate on a global scale and to gain attention. New NGO alliances and networks were formed that were cross-regional and crossed North-South divisions. An increasing number of women's groups contributed to national and international policy-making situations. Women's groups were successful in receiving international and national recognition because of the effort expended to become well prepared in collecting, knowing, and analyzing their facts and in building broad-based coalitions. The key strategies that were used in participating effectively in the conference preparatory process and formal policy-making groups involved five types of activities: 1) NGOs mounted global campaigns on a variety of issues having to do with women's rights and women's involvement in the process; 2) NGOs held multiple strategic planning meetings and built coalitions and consensus at all levels; 3) women's NGOs drafted policy documents, resolutions, treaties, protocols, conventions, and platform documents; 4) women's NGOs gained seating on official delegations by publishing reports, holding meetings, and lobbying and nominating women as representatives; and 5) women's NGOs formed caucuses that met at a daily time and place for holding dialogues with official delegates and policy-makers.

From Rio to Beijing: Engendering the energy debate

New perspectives in the energy sector and new approaches to gender issues are especially conducive to reopening the debate on the role of women in energy policy and research. This article suggests that mutual concerns in energy for a and gender circles, jointly addressed, could further both the Rio energy programme goal of sustainable development, and the Beijing women's agenda of development, equality and peace. While not exhaustive, specific neglected issues for gender research are pointed out here in areas of current and future energy policy concern: promoting the energy transition, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and sustainable transport systems.

Responses to 'The piety of Afrikaans women'

AbstractThe book The piety of Afrikaans women is placed in the context of the methodological discussion on religion feminism, that is religion feminism as it was discussed in Western Europe in the early 1990s. It is argued that in South Africa the book was not read against this background but as an onslaught on Afrikanerdom and as a liberal effort to alienate metaphysics from spirituality. Three reactions for and against the contents of the book are discussed. The first refers to local nationalism, the second to the political agenda of women's spirituality and the third to the relationship between spirituality and historical criticism.

A New Agenda for Women's Health

FOR YEARS, advocates have emphasized that the dimensions of women's health go far beyond functions of the ovaries and uterus. Now, a broad-based group of experts is pushing for a new focus on the behavioral and psychosocial factors that affect women's health. Led by officials of the American Psychological Association (APA), the experts convened in Washington, DC, for the first national conference aimed at developing a specific agenda to address the psychosocial aspects of women's health care. group is using feedback from the conference's participants and advisory committee to draft an agenda that we hope will be available by September, says Gwendolyn Puryear Keita, PhD, director of the APA's Women's Programs Office. Keita pointed out that the agenda is important as a guide in establishing research funding and programming priorities at the federal level. The APA plans to present the agenda to Congress, Keita said, because we're trying to

A new agenda for women's health

A new agenda for women's health

Effects of Individual, Occupational, and Industrial Characteristics on Earnings: Intersections of Race and Gender

Critics of the women's agenda in both research and policy have complained of its exclusivefocus on the experiences of white women. They maintain that as a result of this focus, we know relatively little about the experiences of black women in the labor market compared to those of white women. This article concentrates on generalizations regarding the effects of experience, education, marital status, occupational characteristics, and industrial sector on earnings. To investigate how these variables interact with gender and race to affect pay, we use fixed effects on panel data (1966-81) from the National Longitudinal Survey (NLS). We use regression decomposition to ascertain (1) what factors explain the gender gap in earnings and whether these factors explain the same portion of this gap among blacks and whites, and (2) what factors explain the race gap in earnings and whether thesefactors explain the same portion of this gap among women and men.

Finding Common Ground: The Necessity of an Integrated Agenda for Women's and Children's Health

During the past decade, a new term has entered the medical/legal lexicon : maternal-fetal conflict. Implicit in the terminology is the assumption that a pregnant woman and her fetus have separate and competing rights. This concept has stimulated extensive legal and ethical debate, primarily in the context of medical interventions (cesarean sections and blood transfusions) forced on unwilling pregnant women, and in corporate efforts to bar fertile women from hazardous jobs. On one side of the debate are the proponents of the future child's right to be born of sound mind and body, and society's interest in the delivery of healthy newborns. On the other side, are advocates of a woman's right to reproductive autonomy, bodily integrity, due process, confidential medical treatment, and freedom from gender discrimination. Neither side has challenged the formulation of the problem, or has examined its permeation into public health policy.

From gynecology to GYN-ecology: developing a practice-research agenda for women's health.

Women's health as an area of specialization has moved away from a focus on gynecology to a focus on GYN-ecology, meaning a concern for the fit between the woman and her environment. To be concerned about the fit between person and environment demands an understanding of the extent to which individual behavior is constrained or facilitated by contextual factors: Do larger sociopolitical conditions exist in which a woman can perform the activities of daily living in a way that maximizes her sense of well-being? Seven factors are explored to illustrate the many ways in which women's health has been traditionally constrained by contextual factors. Suggestions for a comprehensive practice-research agenda for women's health are then presented.

Views from the periphery: Changing the political agenda for women in the republic of Ireland and in Scotland

The representation of women as Members of Parliament in the Republic of Ireland and in Scotland is low by European standards. It is argued that two separate political events ‐ the election of Mary Robinson as Ireland's first woman president and pressures for constitutional change in Scotland ‐ could provide the opportunity to change the political agenda for women in these two countries. We record the response of the political parties to the demands for greater representation of women through ‘promotional’, ‘active intervention’ and ‘status quo’ strategies.

Guest Editorial: Needed: A Research Agenda for Women s Oral Health

Guest Editorial: Needed: A Research Agenda for Women s Oral Health

An agenda for women’s history in Ireland, 1500–1900: Part I: 1500–1800

In the last twenty years women’s history has emerged as a major field of scholarly inquiry. An extensive literature has accumulated on the history of women in western Europe and North America, and the contribution which women have made to many different aspects of western society has been rediscovered. New areas of study have been developed as the gender differences in men’s and women’s lives have been recognised and researched. The expanding secondary literature has also led to a lively debate about the purpose, methodology and theory of women’s history. A central focus of discussion has been the relationship between women’s history and mainstream history. Initially research on the history of women tended to work within the parameters of traditional history: to be fitted into its ‘empty spaces’. But dissatisfaction with the male-centred and patriarchal nature of the predominant historical discourse has led women historians to seek out new methodologies and to argue that consideration of history from the perspective of women, as well as of men, is a major challenge to the whole nature of historical inquiry. As Gerda Lerner, a pioneer of women’s history in the United States, put it, women’s historychallenges the traditional assumption that man is the measure of all that is significant, and that the activities pursued by men are by definition significant, while those pursued by women are subordinate in importance. It challenges the notion that civilization is that which men have created, defended, and advanced while women had babies and serviced families and to which they, occasionally and in a marginal way, ‘contributed’.