Root Causes of Poor Health in Women

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HealthWiki > Where Women Have No Doctor > Chapter 1: Women's Health Is a Community Issue > Root Causes of Poor Health in Women

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In this chapter:

 

In this chapter:

It may be easy to name the direct cause of a health problem. For example, we can say that STIs are caused by harmful germs, malnutrition comes from not eating enough healthy food, and problems during pregnancy are often caused by a lack of prenatal (before birth) care. But beneath these direct causes are 2 root causes: poverty and low status.

Poverty

When people do not have enough resources to meet their basic needs for survival, they are experiencing poverty. Poverty negatively affects a person’s physical and mental health. Women are more likely than men to be poor, to live in poverty, and to have health problems as a result.

For many women, this begins before they are born. Babies are smaller at birth and are slower to develop when they are born to someone without enough to eat during and after pregnancy. In many poor families, girls get less food than boys, further harming their growth, and they usually get less education. Later, they often work at jobs with no security, and no legal rights or social protection, where they do not earn enough to escape poverty. Even when women do the same work as men, they are usually paid much less. At home, women do at least twice as much household and caregiving work as men. This work is unpaid and too often taken for granted.

The living conditions of poverty cause physical and mental health problems. Poor women (and others with similar low status) often:

• live in housing with little or no sanitation or clean water.
• do not have enough healthy food and spend a great deal of time and energy searching for food they can afford.
• are forced to accept dangerous work or to work too many hours.
• cannot access medical care, even if it is free, because they cannot afford time off from work or have others watch their children.
• are so busy struggling to survive that they have no time or energy to care for their own needs, plan for the future, or learn new skills.
• are blamed for their poverty and made to feel less important than those with more money.

Poverty often forces women into relationships in which they depend on men for survival. Dependence on another person for their own or their children’s survival often causes them to accept things that harm their own health. For example, to keep a man happy, a woman may accept a man’s violence or have unsafe sex for fear of losing financial support.

Low status of women

Status is the power and respect that a person has in their family and community. Status affects how someone is treated, the resources they have, how they value themselves, the kinds of activities they are allowed to do, and the kinds of decisions they are allowed to make. In most of the world, girls and women have lower status than boys and men. Lower status leads to discrimination—being treated poorly or denied resources because of certain characteristics, in this case, for being female. Discrimination may take different forms in different communities, but it always affects a woman’s health.

Wanting sons rather than daughters. Thinking sons are more valuable than daughters often leads to girls being breastfed for a shorter time, given less food and medical care, and educated less or not at all. The pressure to have sons can also lead to many pregnancies very close together.

Women make up half of the world’s population, but work 2 out of every 3 hours worked in the world, receive only a tenth of the world’s income, and own only a hundredth of the world’s property.

Lack of legal rights or power to make decisions. In many communities, women cannot own or inherit property, earn money, or get credit. When divorced or widowed, they may not be allowed to keep their children or belongings. Women may be denied the ability to decide how family resources are used, when to get health care, whether to travel, or to participate in community decisions without their husband’s permission. Women do most caregiving work—usually unpaid, low status, physically difficult, and socially isolating—which may prevent them from earning income. All this can prevent them from doing things that support good physical and mental health, such as using family planning, having safer sex, getting enough food, and demanding freedom from violence.

When women are raised to value themselves less than men, they often just accept their low status. They may accept poor health as their lot in life and seek help only when their problems are severe.

Medical systems do not meet many people's needs

Poverty and discrimination in the family and community not only lead to more health problems for women, they also make the medical system less likely to serve women’s needs. Government policies and the global economy may add to this problem. In poor countries, many people do not have access to health services of any kind.

This page was updated:13 Nov 2023