Gender is an important determinant of health and disease. However, it is difficult to grasp what the differences in health outcomes between men and women signify. Indeed, public health research has yet to better understand the underlying causes and mechanisms that explain and make visible differential health outcomes between men and women.
Since gender is a complex construct in which biological and social dimensions intersect inseparably, we choose to use the term sex/gender throughout the website. In order to better capture this complexity and help identify what dimensions of sex/gender may be most relevant for differential health outcomes between men and women, this website presents tools and information on how sex/gender can be taken into account in its social and biological complexity in health research and health reporting. We use intersectionality-informed approaches to conduct sex/gender-sensitive research.
There are many observations about the similarities and differences in health between men and women. These similarities and differences follow a complex pattern, as the following example shows.
Explanations for these differences are often based exclusively on biological factors and individual health behaviour.
Questions like the following often remain unanswered in representations and explanations of health inequalities between sexes/genders:
How can social aspects of sex/gender, for example the influence of traditional gender roles, be taken into account when explaining these differences?
How can diversity within sex/gender groups be mapped?
What role do interactions of sex/gender with other social categories such as education, income or ethnic origin play?
The contents of this page address the questions above and are intended to contribute to a better understanding of the influence of sex/gender as a complex social-biological phenomenon. We present tools and information for a sex/gender-sensitive and intersectionality-informed analysis of study participation, data collection, data analysis and health reporting.
How do you achieve gender sensitivity?
- What is intersectionality?
How can complex social groups and societies be represented by study participants?
How do you integrate a multidimensional and intersectionality-informed gender concept into data collection?
How do you carry out data analyses in a way that allows health inequalities to be better understood?
What can civil society actors contribute to gender-sensitive and intersectional health reporting?
How can the language used in health reporting be non-discriminatory?
Reuse
This work is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visithttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/[creativecommons.org] or contact Creative Commons by mail, P.O. Box 1866, Mountain View, California, 94042, USA.