Last Friday, November 19 was International Men’s Day. See what our guest blogger Alanna Shaikh has to say about the role of gender in global health.

By: Alanna Shaikh

In theory, gender is a major factor in designing global health programs. They are gender-sensitive, and gender-balanced. Our monitoring and evaluation data is gender disaggregated. We should have this whole gender issue completely wrapped up.

In practice, though, things look different. “Gender” has turned into just another word for women. We don’t think about the complicated aspects of gender-sensitive programming. We just try to make sure that women get a voice in our work. And that’s important. That’s incredibly important. But it’s not thinking about gender. It’s thinking about women.

And when we only think about women, we miss some major points. Here’s one: men die younger than women, pretty much everywhere in the world. But we design most of our health programs around women. Here’s another: gender is a social construct, distinct from biological sex. But we rarely think about transgender people, or their needs, when we think about health programs.

So, what would it look like if we thought about gender for real? You could write a thesis, or an encyclopedia on the topic, but here are a few ideas:

1)      We’d think about biological sex. We’d look at the different physiological effects of medications on men and women, and make sure that drugs were tested on groups that included all sexes, not just men. We’d make sure that health care providers got training on diseases that are specific to men, like prostate cancer. We’d take the diseases of women, and the diseases of men, equally seriously, and we’d fund disease research in a way that proved it.

2)       We’d think about gender in a lot of different ways, since health is the sum of a person’s life, not just their medical history. We’d look at the impact of gender disparities on both men and women, and look for ways to reduce the impact, and to fight sexism in as many forms as we could.

3)      We’d look at the way men and women use health care. Women and men make different choices about when to access health care, and how to access it. When you’re building, or strengthening, a health system, you need to think about that. Right now, if health care is focused on the needs of the patient (rather than the health care providers), it’s focused on a hypothetical female patient. Men pick up on that, and learn the message that health care is not for them, which benefits no one. Everyone faces gender-related barriers to accessing care

4)      We’d remember that gender is a social construct, and it has different meanings across cultures. There are very few lessons (possibly none) about gender that can be applied universally. We need to think about gender every time we face a new situation, not use a cookie cutter approach.

5)      We’d also remember that many cultures have more than two genders. You can’t ignore the needs of people who don’t fit into a binary gender approach, whether they are Thai kathoeys, the hijras in India, or American transsexuals.

That’s just the start, I ‘m sure. There is a lot more to gender and global health. What am I missing?

Alanna Shaikh is an expert in health consulting, writing about global health for UN Dispatch and about international relief and development at Blood & Milk. She also serves as a frequently contributing blogger to ‘End the Neglect.’ The views and opinions expressed by guest bloggers are not neccesarily the views and opinions of the Global Network. All opinions expressed here are Alanna’s own and not those of any employer or the US government.