Gender and health – aspects of importance for understanding health and illness in the world

I n the call for this cluster of papers in Global Health Action, we included a variety of perspectives regarding gender and health to be covered, among them sexual and reproductive health and rights, gender-based violence, ageing and gender, health systems, climate change, and globalisation; all with respect to gender. From the papers that are now included, we draw the conclusion that some of these aspects are more prevalent than others. For instance, aspects of sexual and reproductive health and rights, and gender-based violence are represented by a number of papers, whereas climate change, ageing, and globalisation are not at all present. Papers oriented towards gender and health with social theories on gender are still scarce, despite the fruitful results, as some of the papers in this cluster show, for instance in Gibbs et al., Marcos et al., or Torres et al., (1Á3). We believe that this mirrors the research field of gender and health, and that new aspects are still to be covered. In this editorial, we briefly summarise and categorise the included papers and also hint at gaps and lacking perspectives when it comes to gender and health. We view gender as a central analytical category in the studies of health. In health research at large, there is a tendency to use the concept gender as equivalent to the concept biological sex, and we can see a rise in this mix of concepts in the past decade, where the term 'sex' is replaced by 'gender' although the focus might not be on social constructions of sex but rather on biological health matters. There has for a long time been an urge for integrating theoretical gender approaches into health research (4Á7). A variety of theoretical approaches are at hand when dealing with research on gender and health and we agree with other researchers that gender is both relational and intersectorial (7, 8). When viewing gender as part of social, institutional, and structural dimensions of human lives, it also becomes evident that the links and interconnections between different power structures are at hand. It matters whether one lives as a woman, a man, or other sexual identities. All this influences health, not only at the individual level but also at all levels of human life. Gender research also problematises other expressions of sex and gender such as transsexualism, transgender, and queer perspectives. Therefore, we do not regard gender as a …