Gender perspective in the definition of health

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), health is an overall condition of physical, mental and social wellbeing, and not just a mere absence of illness, and special attention must not only be focused on the medical aspects of health services but also on ”the basic justice system of how society functions, with particular reference to the access and control that the different sexes have over health resources“.

If we use this perspective of health as a base, we can see that the use of the term ”disability“ can in practice translate into discrimination when this denomination extends to define the person as a whole, referring to her/him as ”disabled“ or, even worse, as ”incapable“.

In 2002, WHO convened representatives from 70 countries to meet in Italy in order to examine the traditional indicators of health, these being based at the time on mortality rates, and adopt a new focus on life which would take into account how people live with their health problems and how those problems can be overcome so that they may live a productive and satisfying life.

If we put aside the definition of ”disability“ in a work context -which is the evolution of the effects of an illness or accident that in turn makes a person unable of doing a determined professional activity-, and we focus on the wider definition of health, we find that women in general, and HIV+ women in particular, experience a series of afflictions specific to them only, or ones that happen with more frequency or intensity, causing the female gender to be more susceptible to a declining quality of life. In general this idea is not even addressed and in some cases it is even ridiculed, which makes it extremely difficult to adequately tackle the problem. In the end this can damage the development of essential activities in daily life.

Going beyond biological differences, the roles that men and women have assigned and assumed in society have a great influence on how we live our health conditions and how we use health systems. Despite this fact there is no gender perspective in health systems that would allow us to tackle this effect. In fact, it has been observed that even though women have a longer life expectancy, if we delve deeper into studies on health conditions we see that women have a higher probability of developing non life threatening chronic ailments which lead to greater rates of disability. To put it in other words, women live longer but with disabilities and ailments that extend over more years. Some examples like anemia, depression, chronic fatigue and pain, can illustrate these types of afflictions that can be highly disabling, that is to say which have a very negative effect on one’s quality of life, and are not always adequately diagnosed or treated.