This volume brings together experts from a variety of disciplines, such as medicine, biology, sociology, epidemiology, anthropology, economics and political science, who focus on three areas: health disparities and inequity due to gender, the specific problems women face in meeting the highest attainable standards of health, and the policies and actions that can address them. Highlighting the importance of intersecting social hierarchies (e.g. gender, class and ethnicity) for understanding health inequities and their implications for health policy, contributors detail and recommend policy approaches and agendas that incorporate, but go beyond commonly acknowledged issues relating to women's health and gender equity in health.

This volume brings together experts from a variety of disciplines, such as medicine, biology, sociology, epidemiology, anthropology, economics and political science, who focus on three areas: health disparities and inequity due to gender, the specific problems women face in meeting the highest attainable standards of health, and the policies and actions that can address them. Highlighting the importance of intersecting social hierarchies (e.g. gender, class and ethnicity) for understanding health inequities and their implications for health policy, contributors detail and recommend policy approaches and agendas that incorporate, but go beyond commonly acknowledged issues relating to women's health and gender equity in health.

More than half of the world's farmers are women. They are the majority of the poor, the uneducated and are the first to suffer from drought and famine. Yet their subordination is reinforced by well-meaning development policies that perpetuate social inequalities. During the 1975-85 United Nations Decade for the Advancement of Women their position actually worsened. This book analyses three decades of policies towards Third World women. Focusing on global economic and political crises - debt, famine, militarization, fundamentalism - the authors show how women's moves to organize effective strategies for basic survival are central to an understanding of the development process.

Population Policies Reconsidered brings together a rare combination of scholars, feminists, social activists, and policy-makers across many disciplines to critically reexamine the scientific foundation of contemporary population policies. This book explores population policy dilemmas based on the perspective of ethics, women's empowerment and health, and human rights. The seventeen chapters are centered around the premise that the single-minded pursuit of demographic goals may not be the most effective means of achieving policy objectives-for such may lead to the abuse or violation of choice and human rights, especially of women. Rather, the book explores the alternative idea that population policies should focus on those ultimate aims of development that are linked to human reproduction-health, social empowerment, and human rights. If respectful of individuals, especially women, such policies are likely to promote better individual welfare and may well also result in desirable demographic outcomes.

This volume brings together feminist social and biomedical scholars from the Southern and Northern hemispheres to examine the aggregate forces that affect reproductive choice. Drawing on numerous case studies, this book examines the range of social, economic, and scientific policies which collectively impact on reproductive well being. Power and Decision offers an analysis of how disparate policies, seemingly unrelated to reproduction, are implicitly "pro-natalist" or "anti-natalist." Moreover, these policies are imbued with gender, race, and class biases. The authors examine the reproductive impact of welfare and parental leave legislation, health services, adoption policies, biomedical research, the global transfer and regulation of reproductive technologies, and international family planning programs. Offering a rare global feminist critique of social policy, this volume makes explicit the direction of current legislative, economic, and scientific trends, providing a basis for discussion, debate, and possible redress.

This volume looks at the extent to which macro-planning and major poverty alleviation programmes of the Asia-Pacific region concretely benefit women, and thus provides a regional perspective on the interrelationships of gender, economic growth and poverty.

The essays included here (a selection from papers presented at a meeting on the subject in Vietnam) focus on issues related to the interlinkages between macro-economic patterns and gender and poverty situations, major approaches to gender issues and poverty alleviation, and new possibilities to promote gender equity and reduce poverty.

Global citizens' struggles today stress the building of effective links between development agencies and the women's movement. Development Action for Women Network, which has long brought together many leading Third World women thinkers and activists, has been vigorously contributing to developing such linkages between the different approaches to and struggles for economic justice and gender justice. Here DAWN sets out the analyses they have developed over decades.In the context of a powerful analytic framework that takes account of the changing circumstances and issues confronting women at the beginning of the 21st century, DAWN argues from a feminist perspective for reinventing social contracts to fulfill the promise of human rights. This is intended to provide a holistic and radical understanding of the synergies, tensions and contradictions between social movements and global, regional and local processes on the one hand, and feminist perspectives and goals on the other.

There is general consensus among the international population community that the commitment achieved at the International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo, 1994) to womens empowerment, along with the related goals of improving womens reproductive health and securing their reproductive rights, represented a paradigm shift in the discourse about population and development, even though there are differences in view whether this is a positive change or not. But while the rhetoric about womens empowerment is pervasive, the concept remains ill-defined, and its relationship to demographic processes has not been well articulated, either theoretically or empirically. This book brings together leading researchers and policy advocates to explore whether the concept of womens empowerment is indeed useful for an understanding of key demographic processes. Its contributors identify new directions for demographic research from the analysis of available data that measure womens empowerment, and point to the implications for population-related policies. Demographic research has focused relatively little to date on gender, let alone the question of power. Yet critiques of available data argue that traditional womens-status indicators, such as education and employment, are often not sensitive enough to capture the nuances of gender power relations and the ways in which they govern womens and mens reproductive behaviour. This book moves forward to the complex task of conceptualizing, measuring, and analysing womens empowerment. In laying this groundwork, it provides critically important insights into the causes and consequences of population change, including migration. The book combines conceptual and empirical research with policy directions and considers the relevance of economic, social, and cultural contexts for the health and well-being of women, adolescents, and children. The countries under study are of both the North and the South. This book represents state-of-the-art knowledge on the two-way linkages between womens empowerment and demographic processes.

This book synthesizes and analyzes three decades of economic, political, and cultural policies and politics toward third world women. Focusing on the impact of the current global economic and political crises - debt, famine, militarization, and fundamentalism - the authors show how, through organization, poor women have begun to mobilize creative and effective development strategies to pull themselves and their families out of immiserating circumstances.

Global citizens' struggles today stress the building of effective links between development agencies and the women's movement. Development Action for Women Network, which has long brought together many leading Third World women thinkers and activists, has been vigorously contributing to developing such linkages between the different approaches to and struggles for economic justice and gender justice. Here DAWN sets out the analyses they have developed over decades.In the context of a powerful analytic framework that takes account of the changing circumstances and issues confronting women at the beginning of the 21st century, DAWN argues from a feminist perspective for reinventing social contracts to fulfill the promise of human rights. This is intended to provide a holistic and radical understanding of the synergies, tensions and contradictions between social movements and global, regional and local processes on the one hand, and feminist perspectives and goals on the other.