Gender gap reduction and the one health benefits

Abstract

Several factors including gender, age groups, cultures and social conditions may affect significantly the risk of diseases and their clinical evolution. Unfortunately, little research has been carried out on these aspects and, consequently few guidelines or interventions have been implemented. In particular, gender is considered a main determinant of inequalities in living conditions, access to health services and, thus, in health protection. Focusing on the gender gap, we propose an ecological approach to find relationships between quantitative indicators of the gender gap dimension, the environmental performance index and the life expectancy at birth as summary of human health index in 155 countries. We speculated on the consequences of wider gender gaps to the population and environmental health. We further explore these relationships considering gender gap and environmental aspect subindexes, to identify determinants that should be addressed to maximize the One Health effect. We found that the gender gap in educational attainment followed by the political empowerment were strongly correlated with life expectancy, environmental health, and ecosystem vitality. Addressing gender issues, particularly the education attainment and political empowerment, can provide positive impact beyond the social dimension and the population health, and gender should be component of the One Health approach. We recommend gender targeted interventions that integrate these aspects into One Health national policies.

Keywords: Eco health; Education; Empowerment; Gender gap; Gender-specific roles; One health.

Fig. 1

Correlation by country between gender gap, life expectancy (A; rho = −0.41, p < 0.01), ecosystem performance (B; rho = −0.53, p < 0.01), and the correlation between life expectancy and ecosystem performance (C; rho = 0.85, p < 0.01, as resulted from the Spearman's rank-order correlation test (p < 0.05 – the dashed grey line fits a linear prediction).

Fig. 2

Interpretation of the correlation among gender gap, life expectancy and ecosystem performance. In red the worst condition (short life expectancy, large gender gap, limited ecosystem performance), in green the optimal conditions (long life expectancy, small or no gender gap, optimal ecosystem performance). (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)