Today, the importance of adopting a gender approach is widely acknowledged when it comes to planning and assessing policies, programmes and health services. But it is also obvious, on the other hand, that development of research on gender and health, and on women’s health, that allows taking action to be based on scientific knowledge, is rather scarce.

More and more frequently research results are presented, either broken down by sex, or sex is included as a variable for study and analysis. We know that this is still insufficient for understanding health inequalities arising from gender, and for taking steps to reduce them. Gender issues are giving rise to growing interest, but their study has been kept away from medicine, for which the concern has …