Empowerment Beyond Numbers: Substantiating Women’s Political Participation

From our households and into our communities, from independent States to international governing bodies, gender operates as a construct of evolving aspects of women’s identities and is a medium through which expectations are prescribed, social norms are formed and power relations are negotiated. Gender constructs that impede women’s access to the public spheres of society diminish the possibility for equitable and empowering life conditions. Of particular emphasis in this paper, facilitating women’s entry into political bodies across the world is also compromised by persistent obstacles in women’s opportunities in both political and private spheres of life. Our research engages female and male panchayat members in rural Gujarat, India. We aim to understand how being a woman affects access to political office, experiences therein, negotiation procedures and decisions taken. It is theorized that facilitating female representation in local governmental structures (a panchayat) through a quota represents one of many routes toward empowerment and one potential means of improving health and household welfare. When empowerment is analyzed within India’s panchayat quota, dimensions such as gender and corresponding perceptions, norms and conditions evidence the centrality of gender as a persistent fault-line in number-based initiatives. The panchayat thus mirrors gendered social realities, demonstrating how complex the processes of substantial democratic political participation and women’s empowerment are, in India and elsewhere

Integration, Clarification, Substantiation: Sex, Gender, Ethnicity and Migration as Social Determinants of Women’s Health

The aim of this paper was to examine, via a scoping review, how the literature focusing on immigrant women’s health, based on selected criteria, has been able to capture not only sex and gender differences but also the other socially grounded determinants of health. Using selected health databases as well as a diversity of keywords, a final sample of 59 was obtained after a number of steps to increase validity and credibility of the process were taken. Since “women” was one of the main keywords, all of the studies included women either by themselves (n=20/59) or along with men (n=39/59). In 34 (57.6%) of the papers reviewed, gender was defined above and beyond “sex” (i.e. some discussion was provided regarding the social context of the study population prior to the presentation of the goal of the study). Ethnicity was merely mentioned without being expanded upon and at times being substituted with race in 26 (44%) of the papers reviewed. Migration was defined in 22 (37.2%) of the papers and was predominantly operationalized by length of stay in the country. While the concepts at hand represent important units of analysis within women’s health research, most studies neglected to either capture gender specificities beyond sex as a biological variable, or to define migration experiences beyond ethnic identity. Anchored within women’s health scholarship seeking for conceptual clarity and accuracy, this paper pleads for an improved consideration of the multiple and interactive social and biological determinants of health, as well as structural conditions at the basis of structural inequities; If the production of socially grounded women’s health research depends upon accurate, fully integrated and applied conceptualizations of relevant dimensions, how can this be facilitated by policy-makers, health research funding bodies, the researchers themselves and ultimately by health care practitioners