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The contribution of a gender perspective to the understanding of migrants’ health

Francisco Bolmar

¹ Instituto Salud Carlos III, Madrid, Spain
² Técnicas Avanzadas de Investigación en Servicios de Salud (TAISS), Madtid, Spain and Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada
³ Universidad de Alcalá, Madrid, Spain
⁴ Ciber de Epidemiología y Salud Pública (CIBERESP), Spain

Correspondence to:
Alicia Llácer, Centro Nacional de Epidemiología, c/Sinesio Delgado no 6 (pabellón 12), Instituto de Salud Carlos III, 28029 Madrid, Spain; allacer{at}isciii.es

In 2005 women represented approximately half of all 190 million international migrants worldwide. This paper addresses the need to integrate a gender perspective into epidemiological studies on migration and health, outlines conceptual gaps and discusses some methodological problems. We mainly consider the international voluntary migrant. Women may emigrate as wives or as workers in a labour market in which they face double segregation, both as migrants and as women. We highlight migrant women’s heightened vulnerability to situations of violence, as well as important gaps in our knowledge of the possible differential health effects of factors such as poverty, unemployment, social networks and support, discrimination, health behaviours and use of services. We provide an overview of the problems of characterising migrant populations in the health information systems, and of possible biases in the health effects caused by failure to take the triple dimension of gender, social class and ethnicity into account.

Abbreviations: GDI, gender development index; GEM, gender empowerment measure; GGI, gender gap index; HDI, human development index; UNFPA, United Nations Population Fund

Keywords: gender perspective; migrants’ health; women

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