Gender and Health: Curriculum Outlines

Citation

Weare, K. (2001), "Gender and Health: Curriculum Outlines", Health Education, Vol. 101 No. 1, pp. 40-41. https://doi.org/10.1108/he.2001.101.1.40.2

It has long been recognised that, throughout the world, women suffer a greater burden of ill health than men, and are further disadvantaged by inequality of access to health care. As a result of the major international, and highly appropriate, concern about this problem, most work on gender has been focused on women’s health. However, more recently there is developing a growing acknowledgement that; in some places and contexts, men are also disadvantaged by gender biases and stereotypes that circumscribe their behaviour. So there is a shift in concern from the narrower concerns of women’s health to a broader and more inclusive concern with gender, which seeks to incorporate gender perspectives into mainstream policies and programmes. It recognises that both women and men will ultimately gain from an approach that addresses their mutually dependent concerns in a comprehensive manner.

In an attempt to address the problem of gender discrimination across the globe, the Commonwealth Secretariat brought together some of the foremost experts across the world, including the West Indies, Australia, Swaziland, South Africa, India, Africa, Canada and the UK. These experts have jointly produced a series of 15 “curriculum outlines” which form the bulk of this short but very packed book. These outlines are intended to form the basic training for health workers, and help them think through gender issues as they relate to health in a wider range of contexts and interventions. The issues covered include gender in relation to: health care; culture; community participation; work; mental health; violence; reproductive health; ageing; and HIV/AIDS. Each three‐page outline includes aims, objectives, a synopsis of suggested course content, and suggested reading. They form a clearly articulated, sophisticated and comprehensive agenda for work in this area.

The authors are rather over‐optimistic if they imagine that these short outlines are sufficient to constitute a course; there is a good deal more to effective education than this. It would have been helpful if the authors had provided some guidelines on the crucial question of what teaching and learning methodologies are appropriate, and worked one of their brief outlines up into a more complete example. Indeed the credibility of the whole exercise would have been improved greatly by a fully written up real life example of one of these courses run in practice. However, the outlines provide an invaluable starting point for those who are running professional and advanced courses in the health sector, in universities, colleges and community settings.

Gender and Health is available from The Technical Support Group, Health Department, Human Resource Division, Commonwealth Secretariat, Marlborough House, Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5HX, UK.