Gender, Health and Human Rights

This essay explores how the role assigned to women by society is detrimental to womens health and how international human rights law requires states to rectify the situation. The introductory section notes that womens reproductive role has led to development of a social framework that limits womens capacities and health in many societies and that planning covers both the practical and the strategic needs of all women. The next section defines and explains the terms sex and gender and discusses roles. Section 3 looks at womens subordination and exclusion arising from the inferior status assigned to women and to female-gendered activities in societies throughout the world. Attention is then paid to how health professions have contributed to the construction of womens role. While medicine has focused attention on the distress of individual women in clinical settings health professionals have inadvertently enabled the subordination and oppression of women by diagnosing womens discontent as medical problems and by treating women as inferior to men. When awareness grows that health is jeopardized by discrimination health professionals may seek redress or prevention of such discrimination through human rights instruments. The essay continues by tracing the development of modern concepts of human rights and by referring to the explicit human rights covenants that relate to womens health issues. The legal approaches that seek to apply human rights to health are then considered in terms of negative (allowing individuals to pursue their own preferences) and positive rights (which sometimes require social reconstruction). It is concluded that international human rights law requires states to rectify discrimination and justifies the initiatives of individuals and nongovernmental organizations to help states conform to the law and to hold them accountable when they fail to do so.