GENDER INEQUALITIES

Gender inequalities in health care

Gender inequalities in health care

Introduction

Though it has been one of the issues discussed for years, discrimination has been intensely taking place in the social agenda in recent years specifically with the effect of postmodern and critical perspectives. Postmodern issues such as fragmentation, diversification, sub-culture, and multiculturalism; and critical perspectives referring the voice of silent and marginal crowds have accelerated the discussions on diversification in the workforce and its management. Furthermore, its relations to human rights make discrimination an archaic continuation of a judicial problematic. This paper will attempt to present a broad discussion on gender inequalities in health care. The discussion will be carried out on a broad context and will attempt to explore the manner in which gender inequalities in health care are present in society and the nature in which it impacts society.

With regard to measurable sex differences, gendered health inequalities are basically equivalent to measurable sex differences in the use of mainstream hospital-based services and gender-specific health needs are tantamount to women's rates of childbirth by age. Such a representation may be characterized as a rational-technocratic formulation informed mainly by the bio-medically based discipline of epidemiology (Adamson, Ben-Shlomo, Chaturvedi & Donovan 2003, 900). It is perhaps because of this reason that organized women's health and men's health groups have also been critical of mainstream health policy and its identification of women's and men's health needs in terms of access to hospital-based services, arguing that their respective needs are far more complex than measurable sex differences in public hospital-based services. Health departments in most States have been responsive to such claims and produced separate gender-specific health policies or strategies for men and women. In some cases, they have also produced gender equity health policies.

Discussion

One of the arguments holding implicit gender discrimination focuses on women's physical-personal characteristics and home-related responsibilities to strengthen its explanation why women cannot compete as successfully as men and why their contributions in economy fall under men's. Also, some other arguments refer to women's emotional nature to rationalize why they are not promoted to top management positions which requires a great deal of capabilities on rational decision making, rather than emotional characteristics. These arguments are accepted as outputs of Western thinking system which matches ration to men. Thus, as these discourses indicate, women are exposed to discriminative behaviors in organizations in different aspects (Benzeval & Judge 1996, 38). Gender discrimination can be explored in three categories. Those are discriminative practices, respectively, defined as overt discrimination, sexual harassment, and glass ceiling. Overt discrimination is defined as considering gender as a criterion for employment-related decisions such as hiring, firing, and promoting. This category also includes discriminations like paying unequally and assigning to women jobs. In most countries, it can be seen that nurses, cashiers, and secretaries are generally women and this has institutionalized vertical sex segregation that is a kind of overt discrimination (Carr-Hill et. al. 1994, 1047). Glancing at gender-appropriate occupations shows us that the jobs matched with women are those characterized ...