This paper contributes to a discussion on how to understand class, gender and health. Understanding is a sympathetic, empathetic, or tolerant in recognizing somebody’s or something’s character and situation. Differences in view on class, gender and health are social factors such as powerlessness, access to resources, and constrained roles. The social workers, psychologist and health professionals are contributor to these issues on understanding class, gender and health (Phillips, 2005). This paper will differentiate class, gender and health in different view.
Will also discuss the issue on why we need to understand them and how the societies respond to these. All this can be read in the next paragraph. Differentiating Class, Gender and Health Class is a set, or collection, group, or configuration-containing members regarded as having certain attributes or traits in common: a kind or category. Another it is a social stratum whose members share certain economic, social, or cultural character (yahoo dictionary, 2006). Sex is the term used to distinguish men and women on the basis of their biological Characteristics.
Gender on the other hand refers to those distinguishing features that are socially constructed. Gender influences the control men and women have over the determinants of their health, for example, their economic position and social status, and their access to resources. Gender configures both the material and symbolic positions those men and women occupy in the social hierarchy, and shapes the experiences that condition their lives. Gender is a powerful social determinant of health that interacts with other variables such as age, family structure, income, education and social support, and with a variety of behavioral factors (WHO, 2004).
While health, it is a metabolic efficiency. Sickness is metabolic inefficiency. Nobody is totally healthy or totally sick. Each of us is a unique combination of health and sickness. And each of us has a unique combination of abilities and disabilities, both emotional and physical (organicmdorg, 2006). Another from David and Nicole Conragan, 2006) “Throughout the years, the interpretations and definitions of health have changed or been distorted and confused. Today, instead of having a health care model, most of our healing professions work from a “Sick Care System”.
According to Psychologist Anne Vitale (1997) “Gender Identity Disorder is a real and serious problem. Although we don’t know all of what may be the cause or causes of the disease that these individuals feel toward their assigned sex, we can be reasonably certain that it is connected with either a congenital irregularity, an irregularity that occurs in the first few years of childhood or some combination of the two. We also know that every individual’s sense of gender, once established, is unchangeable over the individual’s lifetime. ” The Issue Behind the Class, Gender and Health
Stipulated by Michael Albert (2006) “The issue on class and race was existed even before the earliest civilization. The movement of this inequality exist thus many of them against it. They feel highlighting the detailed way of ignoring, denigrating, and ruling one another between opposed groups oppresses them. Women revealed how men talk differently to women, act differently toward women, and make different assumptions about women. Blacks did the same vis-a-vis whites, showing the way racism manifests itself in appearances, attitudes, assumptions, values, mannerisms, and language.
Each reveal any structural conditions which relegate one group to subordinate position vis-a-vis another. The class was to continue being investigated alongside paying attention to actual social interactions, beliefs, relations, aspirations, words, and deeds among folks arrayed in an oppressive hierarchy—would, if it spread to how we looked at class relations, have quickly brought to the table workers’ antipathy for lawyers, doctors, engineers, and, of course, managers.
It would have revealed the basis for that antipathy in structural economic relations that create class division. ” The lower class mostly experienced discriminations. The society will not give them equal in all terms they are the least priorities. In medicine least allocated by health professional. These people feel more depression and anxiety. That needs equal treatment and attention from all sectors in the society. The Response of Social, Psychologist and Health Sector On Class, Gender and Health
One of the paradoxes of research in gender and health is the consistent finding that women’s morbidity rate is higher but livelonger than men. Apparently health is a fluid concept that goes beyond disease; it includes the level of physical, social and mental well being. The irony is that living longer does not necessarily mean a healthier life for most women. Health is about much more than life expectancy, and so we must look beyond it to male and female quality of life and their patterns of behavior (Kigali, 2006). Health disorder exists in men and women at different life cycle.
However, it more observe in women who experienced depression and eating disorders. Another is the substance abuse, for which rates are more than three times higher in adult men than in adult women. The tremendous experienced in anxiety could lead to worse thing the suicidal. Nearly one million people die each year as a result of suicide, approximately the same number and s those who die as a result of homicide and war-related injuries combined. Globally more men (509 000in 2000) than women (305 000 in 2000) take own lives (WHO, 2003).
This equates to about three male suicides for every female one, a pattern that occurs fairly consistently across all age groups, with the exception of advanced old age (. 75 years) where the male: female ratio is even higher (WHO, 2004). The above situation leads to the attention of Pan American Health Organization (PAHO, 2005) that seeks to provide government, civil society, academia, and other cooperation agencies with a set of basic statistical indicators that illustrate the differences between women and men in terms of health status and its socioeconomic determinants.
Gender equality in health means that women and men enjoy the same opportunities to maintain their health, contribute to the development of public health, and benefit from that development. Empowerment is understood as the ability to make decisions and put them into practice. It is a both process and a goal, occurring at both the individual and group levels and requiring that women act as agents of change. Without women’s empowerment, gender equality is not achievable. (PAHO, 2005).