Today sees the launch of the new policy paper from the Oxford Martin School, George Institute for Global Health –
Women’s Health: a new Global agenda | Oxford Martin Policy Paper
The Institute of Population Ageing congratulates the George Institute on highlighting the issue of women’s health not just in terms of sexuality and reproduction – but across their lives. As the paper notes global efforts to improve the health of women and girls have, in the past few decades, largely focused on reducing unacceptably high levels of maternal mortality and morbidity. The success of these programmes have resulted in non-communicable diseases now being the leading causes of death and disability for women in almost all countries in the world. We now know that both the occurrence and outcomes of disease are different for men and women, and that studies which involve only men are not relevant for our understanding of disease within women.
As the paper argues, it is only by undertaking analyses of health data disaggregated by sex and informed by a gender perspective, as well as by including sufficient numbers of women in scientific studies, that a real understanding of women’s health may be achieved.
We thus support their call that the global agenda for women’s health must prioritise a gendered approach to the collection and utilisation of health data, whether in routinely-collected health statistics or in the creation of new scientific knowledge. While this is increasingly the case in advanced economies – the UK, US and EU for example - where policies have been implemented to support the incorporation of gendered approaches into the conduct of research – there are still inconsistencies. As the paper reports, while major science funding bodies have started to request that researchers explicitly identify how they will promote gendered analyses in their research and an increasing number of major peer-reviewed Journals have developed policies requiring that women are routinely included in clinical trials and that authors report gendered analyses in their publications, there are still glaring omissions.
In the paper’s Recommendations to Academia, including universities, professional and academic organisations and journals, they call on professional and academic organisations to recognise, promote and address a broader, integrated women’s health agenda; that universities take a leadership role in developing, promoting and implementing policies requiring that all new research is appropriately designed to facilitate the inclusion of gendered analyses and involve appropriate numbers of women; and that UK-based peer-reviewed medical research journals develop, promote and implement policies requiring that all new research papers submitted for publication include gendered analyses.
Link to Womens' Health: a new global agenda Policy Paper.
About the Author:
Sarah Harper is Professor of Gerontology at the University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing and Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College.
Opinions of the blogger is their own and not endorsed by the Institute
Comments Welcome: We welcome your comments on this or any of the Institute's blog posts. Please feel free to email comments to be posted on your behalf to administrator@ageing.ox.ac.uk or use the Disqus facility linked below.
