GENDER AND HEALTH
GENDER AND HEALTH CHANCES
Women live longer and use health services more, but during their fertile years mostly. Mental illnesses are higher, esp. for certain types, depression rather than psychosis.
BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS
Biologically more at risk during child-bearing age. Difference is reducing as medicine progresses.
Positivist Explanations
- Women are socially more at risk because of thier roles within the home and family.
- Married men live longer than single, but never-married women live longer than married women.
- Marriage reduces female access to resources, e.g. married women eat less (H Graham 1986) and Rowntree (poverty study 1901).
- Higher divorce rates mean more single mothers, and benefit dependence is a threat to health.
- Less likely to be in accident as more confined, but more likely to be at risk from domestic violence.
WOMEN AS USERS OF HEALTH CARE
Interactionist Approaches
- Women are (seen as) different from men.
- Biological and socially constructed differences have been medicalised, esp. concerning reproduction.
- Male doctors try to control women, fertility, contraception are 'health problems'.
- Women are diagnosed differently, more likely to be diagnosed as mentally ill and more likely to accept temporary respite from the family.
- Men can avoid stress from being absent from work. They avoid mental diagnosis as it would affect their career.
- Women's illness behaviour is different.
- Women are more likely to see a doctor, possibly because they were/are less likely to be in full time paid employment.
- Women are more likely to be encouraged to seek medical help for problems associated with housing, poverty, marriage, sex, unhappiness etc.
WOMEN AS PROVIDERS OF HEALTH CARE
Most lower status paid nhs posts are female. Women also often end up as free carers at home (three c's, cooking, cleaning and caring). Men with disabilities are more likely to work than women with the same.