Twitter Chat – Gender and Health Systems: Help Define the Direction of Research

As part of the Health Systems Global (HSG) month of enquiry into gender, in the lead up to International Women’s Day, you are invited to participate in a Twitter chat which will be supported by Research in Gender and Ethics: Building stronger health systems (RinGs).

The chat will take place on February 29, 2016 at 1:00 pm GMT and anybody who is working in the area is free to participate and answer the questions that will be given to panelists. The chat will be recorded in a Storify and circulated to the HSG membership. The next Symposium has a theme focused on “Equity, rights, gender and ethics: responsiveness through values-based health systems” and this is a great opportunity to start the conversation.

Creating a strong foundation based on the building blocks

To elicit your responses, we will ask a series of questions throughout the Twitter chat. These will relate to:

• Financing (What are the gendered implications of critical finance policies? What has gender got to do with Universal Health Coverage?)

• Leadership and governance (Should we promote gender equity in health systems leadership and management, and if so how? How can we support leadership for gender equity in different contexts including in fragile and post conflict contexts?)

• Workforce (What do we know about gender and human resources for health e.g. selection, retention and reward? How does gender effect different cadres of health workers, including community health workers?)

• Products and technologies (Are our product development regimes fit for purpose when it comes to issues of gender? What could be done differently?)

• Information and research (what are key information gaps hindering gender analysis in health systems research, and how can those gaps be filled? How has research been used to improve the gender equity of health services?)

• Service delivery (Are services sensitive to gender and what impact does this have? How can we best support health workers to address damaging gender norms in their interactions? How do gendered norms and practices within the household effect access to care?)

Exploring intersections and systems

In order for gender mainstreaming and gender analysis to succeed it must see how gender interacts with others axes of inequality such as poverty, disability, ethnicity, age, sexuality and geography. This means analysing the social context of inequalities and opportunities specific to each country or context, rather than assuming that the status of women, men, or gender relations is comparable across diverse societies and health systems. We hope that the chat reflects this. Of course many of the issues mentioned under the health systems building blocks interact and are mutually dependent. We’d love reflections on how gender relates to complex adaptive systems, and would like the active participation of all the Health Systems Thematic Working Groups and this may lead to the identification of a host of other cross-cutting issues. We would also like to see the twitter chat encourage submissions of abstracts to Health Systems Global conference 2016 (deadline 20 March 2016) where one of the sub-themes is “Equity, rights, gender and ethics: responsiveness through values-based health systems”.

How to join in

The chat will take place on Monday, February 29,2016 at 1:00 pm GMT.

Follow along and join in the live discussion using the hashtag #HSGgender. If you are not able to attend, please feel free to Tweet your comments to@H_S_Global using the event hashtag.

An edited summary of the Tweet chat will be published in a Storify post shortly after the session.

This news item was originally posted on Health Systems Global.