Gender in Nepal’s health sector

Gender means different things to different people. At its crux, gender is a construct to bring order to social relationships and institutions, and most often to rationalise and perpetuate the unequal distribution of power. It is a building block in the structure of our social and political systems. Health is no exception.1As professionals who have spent decades researching, reporting on, and raising the issue of gender inequality in forums from the local to the global levels, we’re still regularly dismayed by how often gender and health gets ignored—both in terms of its influence on health outcomes and impact on the health workforce.Health systems around the world share a range of gendered characteristics—in divisions and valuations of labour based on gender, in reinforcing male dominance-female submission dynamics between practitioners and patients, and in its body of knowledge in which gendered assumptions, language, and categories are deeply embedded. We know too that…
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