Gender inequalities in health

Abstract

When I first picked up this book I thought it would start by documenting the extent of gender inequalities in health—how much longer than men women live, what they die from, what illnesses men and women are more likely to endure, and the like. However, this book offers a different, and much deeper, analysis of gender inequalities in health than that. It opens with a broad discussion of the changing social environment within which gender is constructed and researched. The book has been compiled as a response to the ‘oversimplified established wisdom’ about gender and health—that women get sicker and men die quicker—offering a ‘critical retrospective’ of gender inequalities and social theory over the past three decades. Each of the chapters addresses particular aspects of the variety of ways that issues of gender and health have been approached, and often oversimplified. They combine, to varying degrees, discussion of theoretical perspectives with empirical work. While the main focus is upon Britain, there is also some attention paid to other industrialized countries, and in particular to the USA and Eastern Europe.

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