The Unspoken Variables of Women's Health
Understanding the social and economic implications women face around the world.
Imagine yourself, walking down the street on a sunny Saturday afternoon. The sun is positioned perfectly overhead and you couldn’t be bothered to do anything but smile, as you feel the breeze running through your hair.
Out of the corner of your eye, you notice someone walking towards you. Before you get a chance to see who it is, they collapse to the ground. Unresponsive and not breathing.
What do you do next? Of course, you would call 911, perform CPR, and do anything in your power to save this person’s life regardless of who it is.
Well in 2017, Researchers from the National Institute of Health analyzed nearly 20,000 cases around the country and found that only 39% of women suffering cardiac arrest in a public place were given CPR versus 45% of men. Men who received CPR were 23% more likely to survive than women.
While it may seem to be a small margin, the cost is tremendous.
Although we are just beginning to acknowledge it, gender is a hierarchy that has been present since the start of humanity.
Despite the fact that words like “gender bias” and “misogyny” are garnering more attention in the media, there is still an unbreakable stigma surrounding social issues such as occupational disparities and sexual violence.
Yet, one of the most under-looked areas where women are severely undermined in their rights is women’s access to healthcare.
Women often face great barriers when it comes to accessing health information and services. By examining the Social Determinants of Health, it is clear where society is lacking in order to improve the health of women.
Specifically, women are subject to a multitude of reproductive disorders, certain cancers, and hormonal implications that 50% of our population will never have to deal with. For this reason, women falling short on the Social Determinants of Health results in a much more grave outcome than we might expect.
The Social Determinants of Health
As a brief overview, the Social Determinants of Health are the social and economic conditions in the environments where people are born, raised, work, or spend their time. They have a tremendous individual’s life expectancy, health status, functional limitations, and other health-related benchmarks.
Specifically, they fall under 6 major groups: Economic Stability, Neighborhood and Physical Environment, Education, Food, Healthcare, and Social and Community Context.
In case you are unfamiliar with the Social Determinants of Health, I would recommend reading this article I have written previously that discusses the issues within the Social Determinants of Health in great detail.
However, we need to look at the determinants from a different lens to understand how societal factors are causing women to fall short on the spectrum.
Economic Stability
Women fall short in this area largely due to gender bias in the workplace. Study after study shows that not only do women face immense barriers in the workplace due to discrimination and gender bias but even show that men agree that gender is the biggest barrier that women face in their careers.
According to a meta-analysis conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2015, About 71% of Americans say the country needs to continue to make changes to give men and women equality in the workplace, while only 28% believe the country has made the necessary changes.
In addition, the pay gap between men and women is beyond what we might expect. According to the Economic Policy Institute in 2016, women with postgraduate degrees were paid only 74 percent of what their male peers were paid. Even with the adjusted pay gap that takes into account differences in education, occupations chosen, skills, hours worked, and job experience, women in the U.S. still make 95 cents to a man’s dollar. While it may not seem to be much, the fact that we must take these differences into account in the first place and women still fall below men speaks volumes about gender bias in the workplace.
With a compromised salary and fewer resources provided through their occupations, it is impossible for women to prioritize their health and maintain their emotional and physical well-being.
Neighborhood and Physical Environment
This determinant is made up of factors concerning the quality of housing, transportation, zip code, and safety. These conditions raise or lower the internal and external stress on an individual, especially through a safe or unsafe environment.
Women are constantly exposed to unsafe conditions and live in fear for their safety. An international survey conducted by Cornell University in 2015, evaluating over 16,000 respondents in 22 countries, found that over 50% of women reported being sexually assaulted in some manner. 72% of U.S. women reported taking different transportation due to harassment and 85% of U.S. women reported experiencing street harassment for the first time before age 17.
Education
This blanket term refers to access to early childhood education, quality of education, the level of education available, language, and literacy. Education plays a large role in an individual’s career and other major life decisions and impacts one’s financial security in the future.
Women around the world are denied the same level of education as their male counterparts and have been for centuries.
According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in 2014, it is estimated that 15 million girls will never set foot in a classroom compared to 10 million boys. This gap is even wider in conflict zones and developing countries, where girls are nearly two and a half times more likely to be out of school than boys.
In addition, out of the world’s 774 million illiterate adults, two out of three are women. This approximation has not changed for the past 20 years. Among the 123 million illiterate youth globally, 76 million are female.
The main obstacles to girls receiving an education are gender stereotypes, legislation, cost, distance, educational infrastructure, pregnancy, and gender-based violence.
These gender disparities remain persistent, with little change over time. Lack of education leads to the reinforcement of stereotypes and increased numbers of health complications, specifically in female populations.
Food and Nutrition
Impoverishment leads not only to hunger and sickness, resulting in compromised health of women, but also to disempowerment and marginalization.
Although it may not seem like women are severely undermined in this category, women fare much worse, especially in developing countries. According to a policy report evaluating the hunger crisis in 2020, women eat last and least in many cultures. Prior to the explosion in Beirut, 85% of women CARE surveyed in Lebanon were already eating smaller portions, compared to only 57% of men. In Afghanistan, women and men are both missing meals, but women are missing one more day of meals each week than men.
A global meta-analysis, analyzing 73 reports targeting the hunger pandemic, found that 46% of the reports do not refer to women and girls at all. In addition, the analysis concluded that none of the reports consistently analyzed or reflected the gendered effects of the pandemic and hunger crises, and less than 7% of the reports proposed concrete actions to resolve gender inequalities in nutrition.
Not only are women globally malnourished in comparison to men, but we aren’t willing to acknowledge it either.
Healthcare
The Healthcare determinant generally refers to health coverage, quality of care, and/or access to care.
In regards to healthcare, women fall short because of the lack of training and awareness amongst healthcare providers and health systems of the specific health needs and challenges of women and girls.
Gender discrimination is real when it comes to healthcare. In a survey of over 2,400 women with chronic pain, 83% said that they had experienced gender discrimination from their healthcare providers and over 65% said that they feel doctors take them less seriously because they are a woman.
Part of this comes down to business. According to the US Department of Labor, women incur health expenses of more than 80% higher than men — even though they aren’t treated as quickly, are more likely to wait longer than men in emergency rooms, and are more likely to be told their pain is simply a result of emotional stress.
Social and Community Context
This determinant is comprised of social integration, socioeconomic status, discrimination, stress, support systems, and anything else concerning the external relationships of an individual.
Women are largely hindered in this context as shown by staggering women's’ poverty rates. According to the U.S. Census Bureau in 2015, women’s poverty rates were substantially above the poverty rates for men once again; more than 1 in 7 women (or nearly 18.4 million) lived in poverty in 2014.
In addition, women suffer traumatically from a lack of support systems when they need help the most. According to the APA, women with lower incomes are more likely to develop problems with drinking and drug addiction, which are significantly influenced by social stressors linked to poverty.
Mothers fare the worst. According to the CDC, about 1 in 8 babies has a mother suffering from postpartum depression, while half of them had mothers experiencing depression at some level of severity.
What Can We Do?
The healthcare systems we have in place around the world keep women sick, uninformed, and at the mercy of a system that isn’t intended to treat them.
To ignite change within this sector, we must focus on the social and material conditions of women’s lives. As shown by the Social Determinants of Health, the underlying socioeconomic barriers that women face are the biggest determinants of poor health among female populations.
We must start putting an emphasis on addressing the social and economic sources of ill health among female populations at regional and national levels. Through institutional and societal intervention at all levels, we must shift the way society perceives women in every aspect of society. Thus, preventing more illness, chronic disease, and deaths than we would likely be able to through healthcare intervention.
At the same time, we must continue to develop our understanding of changing gender relations, social norms and beliefs, and differences in access to resources between men and women. We must destigmatize these concepts by raising our voices to the role that societal and economic marginalization play in healthcare. Whether through speaking up for yourself or in front of an audience, reading and sharing articles like this one, or changing the views within your house or your workplace, understanding and spreading these ideas is crucial.
By continuing to examine these facets of society, bringing awareness, and enacting change in our personal lives and the lives of those around us, we can ensure that society progresses in a manner that minimizes the bias and gaps between genders in all institutions.
Thank you very much for giving this a read. If you learned something from this article, please share it with your friends and family. Be sure to connect with me and/or message me on Linkedin, and leave this article a clap 👏 if you found it to be informative!
