IMPACT OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS ON WOMEN’S WELL-BEING

Abstract

The existing social cleavages based on class, caste, gender, religion, and ethnicity have differential impact on health. Our paper focuses on how health status reflects gender imbalance both in traditional and complex societies, in developing and developed countries. The correlation between gender and health status is intricate and contentious, thus our aim is to investigate it, highlighting why and where women’s social status is low, also their health conditions, compared to the male ones, and how they are threatened by a long series of social and environmental factors. In order to prove such assumption we use different case studies concerning malnutrition, complications with pregnancies and Sexual Transmitted Diseases (STDs), short and long-term consequences of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), as well as restricted access to modern health care. These issues affect women in different ways depending on their social and economic status, but also on the area where they live (developing/developed; rural/urban; and so on). Furthermore, they allow us to move from local to global in the age of globalisation and mediatisation. Our paper presents a range of data gathered mainly through secondary sources giving evidence of the fact that health risk factors are more gender biased against women.