Abstract
Gender Analysis on Health Promotion Policies: Focusing on Youth and Middled-aged Population
Dongsik Kim
Cheyon Tong
Youngjee Woo
Jiwon Jeong
This study is to suggest gender approaches and improvements in setting up national health policies including Health Promotion Policy by doing an in-depth analysis of the extents of men and women's lifetime inequality in healthy life practices.
The study was conducted in three approaches as follows.
First, it understood characteristics of policies related to the healthy life practices and their blind areas as well as the current condition of the policies by dividing them by gender and lifetime.
Second, it evaluated progress and features between men and women in gender and lifetime perspectives based on major performance indicators of the healthy life practices in Health Plan(HP).
Third, it grasped the actual state of affairs regarding the general public's healthy life practices and analyzed differences and causes of the healthy life practices between men and women.
As results, there were differences on awareness, attitudes and practices towards smoking, drinking, physical activity and nutrition by gender and age. In particular, unlike men, women were more likely to be directly or indirectly influenced by a traditional gender role and gender norms which emphasizes feminity to women in a country or a region where women live. Understanding on the gender norms and the gender approaches based on the understanding can contribute to maximizing substantiality of the policies for smoking, drinking, physical activity and nutrition targeting men and women at every stage of their life cycle.
In reviewing the current national health policies on smoking, drinking, physical activity, and nutrition by lifetime, it was found that the policies for adolescent focused on prevention while the policies for middle and old aged people concentrated on treatments. However, the policies for young and middle-aged people had lack of both prevention and treatments in comparison to the policies for those two groups. For this reason, the study found that the healthy life practices of the young and middle-aged people were more vulnerable or more at risk than people in the other stages of the life cycle. Above all, the policies for the women have been almost absent considering the present condition that the most of policies for women's healthy life practices were limited to pregnant women.
Based on the research results, the study suggests policy implications for HP2030 as follows. First, during establishing the performance indicators, HP2030 should build gender indicators through in-depth analysis of researches with gender approaches and lifetime characteristics. Second, there are needs to develop indicators which can explain discriminative features appeared in men and women from a gender perspective. Third, there should be efforts to find or establish policies for the young and middle aged people who are the more vulnerable group in the healthy life practices than the other stages of life cycle with taking demands by gender into consideration.
Keywords: gender approach, healthy life practice, smoking, drinking, physical activity, nutrition, lifetime
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