disagreement (most frequently by southerners, against civil-rights legislation

The disparity in size between states has exploded.

rdheaded political compromise between people who believed in some version of what we’d call “democracy” and people who didn’t. The Founders

The Senate is affirmative action for white people. If we had to design political institutions from scratch, nobody — not even Republicans — would be able to defend a system that massively overreprese

The reason is simple: Residents of small states have proportionally more representation, and small states tend to have fewer minority vo

hild H

1,167.901,566.00778.6

290.2265.4314.91,251.51,710.885

Absolved of thought, of responsibility, of guilt, and finally of humanity, all is well: the head of the state thinks for us, we need only obey. If the head of the state happens to be criminally insane, that is not our affair.

he never thought of the murdered; he thought of the effect they made on him, and the probable bad effect on the nerves of the young SS.

closing the file against future intrusion on his work.

His voice is ugly, with a hard R, a sound that makes one think of a hammer and a knife. Neither by voice, accent, nor vocabulary is he an educated man.

mankind

Behind me, in the public section of the courtroom, an old woman with a worn fine face, wearing a kerchief on her head and a newspaper around her shoulders, against the unaccustomed air cooling, wept -- without movement, without sound, and without stopping

miserly crack

Moving to Opportunity program, which randomly assigned families living in high-poverty neighborhoods to groups that were and were not given vouchers to move to low-poverty areas. Children in these famil

Feminist theories show how such male-gendered laws are structured and enforced at a cost to women's health. Similarly, laws permitting younger marriage of girls than boys promote the stereotyping of women in childbearing and service roles, and exclude them from the education and training that boys receive to fulfill their masculine destiny as family and social leaders

Supplying appropriate care for women may be characterized as a duty of positive human rights to which states must allo- cate resources.

Positive rights may be difficult to observe in states with strained resources. However, it is a notorious fact that states invoking poverty to justify nonobservance of duties to de- fend women's health often provide disproportionately large military budgets.

Human rights regarding health require that the state pro- vide health care that individuals are not able to obtain or provide on their own.

introduce a gender perspective into na- tional health policies.

Women's negative human rights require that states remove all such barriers to women's pursuit of their health interests, except for those governing safety and efficacy of health services in general

omen's poor physical and psychological health may represent a metaphor for the poor health of women's rights in the body politic and in influential community institutions, whether political, economic, religious, or health car

Rights relevant to health include those to protect women's employment and grant equal pay for work of equal value; to education; to information; and to political participation, influence, and democratic power within legislatures. These last rights permit women's rights to be respected in the general conduct of states

Modern analysis has shown systemic denial and suppression of information concerning women's victimiza- tion by violence and rape in their homes.

Clinically trained health professionals enhance their di- agnostic and therapeutic capacities via recognition of the links between women's health status and the social environments they inhabit.

The critical transition is from doctors treating women as inferior to men, physiologically different only in reproductive functions, to recognizing women as equal to men, only different because of the gendered experiences that affect their health.

Illness alone was used to explain women's unhappiness in the midst of affluence and caring family members, a situation that by conventional stan- dards should produce contentedness

hether it is dis- criminatory and socially unconscionable to criminalize a medical procedure that only women need is a question that usually goes not simply unanswered, but unasked.

Women's image as vectors of disease to sexual partners and to children they conceive has been recycled in the modern pandemic of AIDS

omen being primary or sole economic supports of their families, and also being unmarried, widowed, or abandoned mothers of their children.

Societies have modelled their role ex- pectations on these assumptions of the natural order of hu- mankind. Historic social structures, including the organiza- tion and conduct of warfare, the hierarchical ordering of in- fluential religious institutions, the attribution of political power, the authority of the judiciary, and the influences that shape the content of the law, reflect this gender difference of male dominance and female subordination.

Sex is a matter of biological differen- tiation, whereas gender is a social construct by which vari- ous activities and characteristics are associated with one or the other sex

1994 World Report on Women's Health, issued by the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics, concluded that future improve- ments in women's health require not only improved science and health care, but also social justice for women and re- moval of socially and culturally conditioned barriers to women's equal opportunity.

Accordingly, women have been considered only to the extent that they are different from men, focusing medical attention on reproductive characteristics.

Their practical needs are addressed through programs like the Safe Mother- hood Initiative, co-sponsored by several UN agen

But it can also deny a woman consideration as anything more than a vehicle for human reproduction. Women's reproductive function fits within a social frame- work of gender that affects women's capacities and health

. Sex categorization and the accomplishment of gender are not the sam

To be sure, equality under the law does not guarantee equality in other arena

n. Doing gender furnishes the interactional scaffolding of social structure, along with a built-in mechanism of social control. In appreciating the institutional forces that maintain distinctions between women and men, we must not lose sight of the interactional validation of those distinctions that confers upon them their sense of "naturalness" and "rig

If we do gender appropriately, we simultaneously sustain, reproduce, and render legitimate the institutional arrangements that are based on sex category. If we fail to do gender appropriately, we as individuals-not the institutional arrangements-may be called to account (for our character, motives, and predispositio

re contrived with respect to the fact that others will judge and respond to us in particular ways. We have claimed that a person's gender is not simply an aspect of what one is, but, more fundamentally, it is something that one does, and does recurrently, in interaction with ot

128 GENDER & SOCIETY / June 1987 categories of being (Garfinkel 1967, pp. 116-18) with distinctive psychological and behavioral propensities that can be predicted from their reproductive functions. Competent adult members of these soci- eties see differences between the two as fundamental and enduring- differences seemingly supported by the division of labor into women's and men's work and an often elaborate differentiation of feminine and masculine attitudes and behaviors that are prominent features of social organization. Things are the way they are by virtue of the fact that men are men and women are women-a division perceived to be natural and rooted in biology, producing in turn profound psycho- logical, behavioral, and social consequences. The structural arrange- ments of a society are presumed to be responsive to these diff

he other. Sex, we told students, was what was ascribed by biology: anatomy, hormones, and physiology. Gender, we said, was an achieved status: that which is constructed through psychological, cultural, and

n. Rather than as a property of individuals, we conceive of gender as an emergent feature of social situations: both as an outcome of and a rationale for various social arrangements and as a means of legitimating one of the most fundamental divisions of so

ng ‘overly intellectual’ and‘obscure’ messages

women and men

Gender equality legislation in the USA currently disallows such sex-specificdiscriminations unless sex-specific risk behaviours are proven to be genetically orbiologically base

What, for example, might be the impact on female depression, ormen’s negative coping behaviours?

edia images of female smoking asfashionable. Following the campaign, the percentage of young women, aged 18
35, who smoked, dropped by an average of 4%,

man

hat depression in women, and alcohol use and risk-taking in men, aregendered manifestations for similar underlying distress. Po

Theway that gender interacts with stigma, to affect compliance with care, can differsignificantly by locale, depending on local confidence about TB treatment, andgendered aspects of the marriage and job markets

As the proportion ofactive infections is similar among boys and girls, the greater number of activeinfections among adult women is attributed to their greater contact with infectedchildren. These disparities in vulnerability are compounded by men’s greateraccess to cataract surgery in many parts of the developing world. Hence, theglobal excess of female blindness is attributed to an (hypothesized) sex-linkedvulnerability to cataract, a gendered risk of trachoma, and a gendered distributionof eye care services. Thi

or the possibility that the relevantdiagnostic criteria are, themselves, gender-biased, lea

This extends to subtle but widespread assumptionsabout the inevitability of interpersonal violence,

Differential gendered obligations to children, the sick, and the community affectexposure to infections (e.g. trachoma, influenza), and the structure andresponsiveness of the health system itself biases care.

endered leisure activities and ways of coping with life stress, shapedby social messaging about what leisure activities a male or female shouldundertake, result in differential rates of cigarette smoking,

health outcomes, such as the greater risk ofdrowning among males worldwide, because of their roles as fishermen andboatmen, and, by contrast, the greater number of burnings among women, due totheir responsibility for cooking and fire-tending

Several authors have highlighted possible gender biases, in currentdiagnostic instruments, that would lead to under-diagnosis of male depression(Rutz 1999, Bech 2001, Moeller Leimkuehler et al. 2007). The feministcommunity, in fact, has questioned, for some time, assumptions that womenare inherently vulnerable to mental illness (Chessler 1972). Ironically, thediagnosis and gendered causes of depression may receive more concertedattention, given the growing interest in male depressio

Epidemiologic data maybe subject to systematic biases, including intrinsic sex and gender biases (Sundby1998, Hanson 2002). For example, select conditions are known to be under-reported, by one sex or another, due to gender-based fears of stigma anddiscrimination

s how sex and gender vulnerabilities may be overlaid on oneanother in ways that can exacerbate sex differences in outcome, or mitigate risks(e.g. the female excess in blindness)

An acknowl-edgement that certain aspects of gendered behavioural expectations are harmfulto health, or even potentially fatal, begs a discussion on whether re-visioninggender may be warranted for public health purposes.

Principal among these is that sex and gender are frequentlyconflated in the epidemiologic and medical literature.