PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Alicia Llácer
AU  - María Victoria Zunzunegui
AU  - Julia del Amo
AU  - Lucía Mazarrasa
AU  - Francisco Bolůmar
TI  - The contribution of a gender perspective to the understanding of migrants’ health
AID  - 10.1136/jech.2007.061770
DP  - 2007 Dec 01
TA  - Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health
PG  - ii4--ii10
VI  - 61
IP  - Suppl 2
4099  - http://jech.bmj.com/content/61/Suppl_2/ii4.short
4100  - http://jech.bmj.com/content/61/Suppl_2/ii4.full
SO  - J Epidemiol Community Health2007 Dec 01; 61
AB  - 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.