Gender Issues & Women empowerment.ppt

Worldwide, women are disproportionately affected by economic vulnerability, lower social status, and limited access to education compared to men. The importance of addressing gender inequalities in access to healthcare has been well-established in the literature with a demonstrated reduction in mortality and morbidity for men and women alike

1. Reproductive Maternal and
Child Health
Dr. Shubha DB
Associate Professor
Community Medicine
JJM Medical College

2. Content
CM10.9 Describe and discuss gender issues and women
empowerment

3. Gender Issues

4. Gender Issues
•Gender is not same as sex.
•Gender refers to the economic, social, political, and cultural attributes,
opportunities, and constraints associated with being a woman or girl, man or
boy; sex refers simply to the biological and physical differences between men
and women.
•Gender is currently recognized as a term that reflects the complex social
relations between men and women.
•Accepting biologically determined differences as being more unchangeable,
the focus is on socially constructed roles that have developed historically
within and across cultures.

5. Gender Issues
•Gender roles and gender norms are culturally specific and thus vary
tremendously around the world.
•However, men and women differ substantially from each other in power,
status and freedom, men having more power than women in almost all
societies.
•Women's gender roles give them some power but are more limited and
mainly influenced by her culture, age, income and education.

6. Gender Issues
•Major component of Health & Family Welfare Programme is related to health
problems of women and children, as they are more vulnerable to ill health
and diseases.
•Ill health of women is mainly due to poor nutrition, gender discrimination,
low age at marriage, risk factors during pregnancy, unsafe, unplanned and
multiple deliveries, limited access to family planning methods and unsafe
abortion services.

7. Gender inequality through health
indicators
•A skewed distribution of health indicators is the characteristics of the nation since
independence.
•It is seen in adverse sex ratio. The female to male ratio is decreasing every decade as shown
in the census conducted every 10 years.
•Female feticide is rampant and has been documented from all parts of India.
•According to media reports, the Sex ratio at birth for children born in the last five years has
improved in 2019-21 from 2015-16 in all states except for Himachal Pradesh, Bihar,
Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Meghalaya, Goa and
Nagaland.

8. Gender inequality through health
indicators
•Less number of women seeks health care compared to men.
•A girl child needs to have more episodes of diarrhea or more severe respiratory infection to
see a health professional.
•Both men and women utilize care, but with different motives and expectations, leading to
contrasting health-seeking outcomes.
•These gender-induced contrasts relate to a preference for socio-cultural (women) versus
technological (men) therapies and long (women) versus fast (men) treatment, and are
linked to their different societal and familial roles.
•The role of women in following and maintaining socio-cultural norms leads them to focus
on care that involves long discussions mixed with socio-cultural traits that help avoid
economic and social sanctions, while the role of men as bread earners requires them to
look for care that ensures a fast and complete recovery so as to avoid financial pressures.

9. Gender inequality through health
indicators
•High stress levels among women lead to increased vulnerability to behavioral
problems.
•The health centres are not equipped enough to be women friendly ranging from
less women in health work force to lack of privacy at OPDs and wards.

10. Gender inequality
Percentage of boys and girls
attending school in the
2019-20 school year, NFHS-
5, India: Urban

11. Gender inequality
Percentage of boys and girls
attending school in the
2019-20 school year, NFHS-
5, India: Rural

12. Women Empowerment
•In 2015, the United Nations launched a
new set of objectives to guide countries
towards sustainable development.
•Given its potential to promote economic
growth, reduce poverty and accomplish
human rights, the fifth Sustainable
Development Goal (SDG) specifically
mentions the need to “empower all
women and girls”.

13. Women empowerment
•Women’s empowerment is a complex concept often defined as an increased
capacity to make purposive choices and to transform those choices into
desired actions and outcomes.
•More empowered women are more likely to provide better care for their children
(immunization and nutrition) and have higher levels of health service utilization
both for themselves and for their children, including institutional delivery,
antenatal care and family planning, thus also contributing to the third SDG on
health.

14. Women empowerment in India
•Women, as an independent target group, account for
495.74 million and represent 48.3 per cent of
country’s total population, as per the 2021 Census.
•Empowering women as a process demands a life-cycle
approach.
•Therefore, every stage of their life counts as a priority
in the planning process.

15. Women empowerment in India
•Depending upon the developmental needs at every stage,
female population has been categorized into 5 distinct
sub-groups.
•Girl children in the age-group 0-14 years
•Adolescent girls in the age-group 15-19
•Women in the reproductive age-group 15-44 years
•The elderly women in the age-group 60+ years
•Women in the economically active age group 18-59
years

16. POLICIES AND PROGRAMMES: A REVIEW
Legislative Framework For Women
•The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006 has been enacted to punish those who
promote, perform and abet child marriages.
•Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (PWDVA), 2005. The objective
of the law is to prevent violence and provide immediate and emergency relief in case
of such situations irrespective of the status of woman’s relationship with the
respondent.
•Dowry Prohibition Act was enacted in 1961. The Act defines dowry and penalizes
the giving, taking or abetting the giving and taking of dowry.

17. POLICIES AND PROGRAMMES: A REVIEW
•GoI right from the very First Five Year Plan (1951-56) treated as a subject of ‘welfare’
and clubbed together with the welfare of the disadvantaged groups like destitute,
disabled, aged, etc.
•The Central Social Welfare Board (CSWB), set up in 1953, acts as an Apex Body at
national level to promote welfare-related activities for women and children.
•The Second to Fifth Plans (1956-79) continued to reflect the very same welfare
approach, besides giving priority to women’s education, and launching measures to
improve maternal and child health services, supplementary feeding for children and
expectant and nursing mothers.

18. POLICIES AND PROGRAMMES: A REVIEW
•The National Health Policy 2001 promised to ensure increased access to women to basic
health care and commits highest priority to the funding of the identified programmes relating
to women’s health.
•During this period, several new initiatives were taken as part of the Reproductive and Child
Health (RCH) Programme, in order to make it broad-based and client friendly.
•All the interventions of the erstwhile programme of Child Survival and Safe Motherhood
(CSSM) became part of RCH.
•During this period, the focus shifted from the individualized vertical interventions to a more
holistic integrated life-cycle approach with more attention to reproductive health care.
•This includes access to essential obstetric care during the entire period of pregnancy, provision
of emergency obstetric care as close to the community as possible, improving and expanding
early and safe abortion services and provision for treatment of Reproductive Tract
Infections/Sexually Transmitted Infections (RTI/STI) cases at the sub-district level.

19. POLICIES AND PROGRAMMES: A REVIEW
•Under the Universal Immunization Programme, launched in 1985-86, which
became part of the RCH Programme in 1997, the coverage of Tetanus Toxoid
Vaccination of pregnant women was also promoted.
•The National Nutrition Policy (1993) advocates a comprehensive inter-sectoral
strategy for alleviating all the multi-faceted problems of under/malnutrition and its
related deficiencies and diseases so as to achieve an optimal state of nutrition for all
sections of society but with a special priority for women, mothers and children who
are vulnerable as well as ‘at-risk’.
•Of the two major problems of macro and micro-nutritional deficiencies that the
women, mothers and children suffer from, while the former are manifested through
chronic energy deficiency (CED), the latter are reflected in Vitamin A, Iron and Iodine
deficiencies.

20. POLICIES AND PROGRAMMES: A REVIEW
•The strategies adopted include –screening of all pregnant women and lactating
mothers for CED; identifying women with weight below 40 kg and providing
adequate ante-natal, intra-partum and neo-natal care under the RCH programme and
ensuring they receive food supplementation through the Integrated Child
Development Services (ICDS) Scheme.
•The ICDS, launched in 1975, provides supplementary feeding to bridge the nutritional
gaps that exist in respect of children below 6 years and expectant and nursing
mothers.

21. POLICIES AND PROGRAMMES: A REVIEW
•The National Population Policy adopted in 2000 seeks to address the issues related
to population stabilization and to ensure universal access to quality contraceptive
services as a step towards attaining the two-child norm.
•It called for reduction in the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) and Maternal Mortality Rate
(MMR), immunization of children, promoting delayed marriage for girls and
enhancing the number of institutional deliveries.

22. POLICIES AND PROGRAMMES: A REVIEW
•The National Policy on Education, announced in 1986 (revised in 1992), gave a big
momentum to the task of providing basic education for all.
•Concerted efforts made during the Ninth Plan were able to expand access, increase
retention and improve learning achievements of children in primary and upper
primary schools.
•The National Literacy Mission, set up in 1988 with the goal of attaining full literacy,
continued to follow a multi-pronged strategy to eradicate illiteracy in the country.
•The scheme targets children in the age-group 6-14 years who have remained outside
the formal system due to socio-economic and cultural reasons.

23. POLICIES AND PROGRAMMES: A REVIEW
•The scheme of Assistance to Women’s Co-operatives, initiated during 1993-94, aimed
exclusively at the economic betterment of women, by focusing special attention on
their needs and providing assistance in the form of assured work and income by
organizing co-operative societies for taking up economic activities in agro-based
commercial/industrial sectors.
•The Women Dairy Co-operative Leadership Programme nurtures leadership amongst
women dairy farmers for economic and social empowerment besides ensuring their
say in the governance of dairy cooperatives.

24. POLICIES AND PROGRAMMES: A REVIEW
•‘Swayamsiddha’, -an integrated programme for empowerment of women through a
major strategy of converging the services available in all the women-related
programmes besides organizing women into SHGs for undertaking various
entrepreneurial ventures
•Launching of ‘Swadhar’ to extend rehabilitation services for ‘Women in Difficult
Circumstances’
•Introduction of a Bill on Domestic Violence against Women (Prevention)to
eliminate all forms of domestic violence against women and the girl child

25. POLICIES AND PROGRAMMES: A REVIEW
Women Empowerment Schemes
1.Beti BachaoBeti PadhaoScheme
2.One Stop Centre Scheme
3.Women Helpline Scheme
4.UJJAWALA : A Comprehensive Scheme for Prevention of trafficking and Rescue, Rehabilitation and Re-
integration of Victims of Trafficking and Commercial Sexual Exploitation
5.Working Women Hostel
6.SWADHAR Greh (A Scheme for Women in Difficult Circumstances)
7.NARI SHAKTI PURASKAR
8.Mahila police Volunteers
9.Mahila Shakti Kendras(MSK)
10.NIRBHAYA

26. Schemes for women
Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana
(PMMVY), 2017
•The Scheme envisages providing cash incentive
amounting to Rs. 5,000/-in three installments
directly to the Bank/Post Office Account of
Pregnant Women and Lactating Mother
(PW&LM) in DBT Mode during pregnancy and
lactation in response to individual fulfilling
specific conditions –

27. Schemes for women
One Stop Centre
•Many women who face violent crimes do not know where to go for support.
•Popularly known as Sakhi Centres, the Scheme of One Stop Centre (OSC) is
implemented across the country since 1st April, 2015 for facilitating access to an
integrated range of services including police, medical, legal, psychological support
and temporary shelter to women affected by violence.
•The Scheme is funded through Nirbhaya Fund.

28. Schemes for women
Women HelpLine
•The Scheme of Universalization of Women HelpLine is being implemented since
1stApril, 2015 and is intended to provide 24 hours emergency and non-
emergency response to women affected by violence through referral service
(linking with appropriate authority such as police, One Stop Centre, hospital) and
by providing information about women welfare schemes/ programmes across the
country through a single uniform number (181).

29. Schemes for women
Mahila Police Volunteers (MPVs)
•They are envisaged to act as a link between police and the community and
facilitate women in distress.
•MPVs serve as a public-police interface in order to fight crime against women and
report incidents of violence against women such as domestic violence, child
marriage, dowry harassment and violence faced by women in public spaces.

30. Schemes for women
Swadhar Greh
•The women victims of unfortunate circumstances who are in need of institutional
support for rehabilitation so that they could lead their life with dignity.
•The Scheme envisages providing shelter, food, clothing and health as well as
economic and social security for the women victims of difficult circumstances
which includes widows, destitute women and aged women.

31. Conclusion
•Promoting social and economic empowerment of women through cross-cutting
policies and programmes, mainstreaming gender concerns, creating awareness
about their rights and facilitating institutional and legislative support for enabling
them to realize their human rights and develop to their full potential.
•Empowered women living with dignity and contributing as equal partners in
development in an environment free from violence and discrimination; and, well-
nurtured children with full opportunities for growth and development in a safe and
protective environment.

32. THANK YOU