Gender Terms and Debate: Analyzing Public Documents and Issues

Running head; Gender terms and debate 1
GENDER TERMS AND DEBATE
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Gender terms and debate 2
In our world today, the topic concerning gender has always been on the forefront with
a lot of criticism and debate in some of the issues regarding the same including gender equality,
transgender issues, masculinity and feminism. Gender equality has always been a major
concern since it aims at ensuring fairness and equality to both male and female genders within
the society. According to Aagaard (2016), gender equality is achieved when women and men
enjoy similar rights and opportunities across all sectors of society including economic
participation and decision making and when the different behaviors, aspirations and needs of
both men and women are valued equally and favored. Different countries across the world are
aiming at ensuring that gender equality is achieved completely with various worldwide
organizations such as WHO and United Nations hoping in to enhance this. Various public
documents have included the issue of gender in the aim of promoting equality and in effort to
eliminate sexism and gender bias trends. The aim of this discussion is to discuss issues evolving
around gender and analyzing how various relevant public documents apply the concept of
gender.
Vinogradova, (2016) argues that most organizations and institutions today tend to focus
more on women and their rights all in the name of gender equality. So many women
empowerment groups have been created within the society and this has led to forgetting about
men who also have rights to be taken care of. In the sustainable development goals, a
collection of seventeen goals set by the United Nations to transform the world and make it
better, gender equality comes fifth in the set goals. In this goal the United Nations focus mainly
on empowering women and ensuring that they get equal access to education, health care,
decent work and representation in political and economic decision making processes. It is true

Gender terms and debate 3
that women and girls continue to suffer discrimination and violence in most parts of the world
(McCammon at al (2018)), but as time goes by, women have realized their rights and are
forming empowerment and activist groups to stand and be recognized within the society. The
idea that some jobs are meant for men alone is fading as women are also up to the task and
this has helped change the notion that women cannot do certain jobs.
The attention has shifted therefore towards the girl child in an effort to promote gender
equality in the world. Men on the other hand have been left out in such programs since they
are viewed as contented within the society and are not vulnerable to assault and violence
though this is not always the case. Since 2001, World Health Organization (WHO) has published
statistics called the Healthy Life Expectancy (HALE) defining the average number of years a
person is expected to live in full health. The statistics show that as of the year 2015, the healthy
life expectancy at birth was 63.1 years. Statistics have also shown that the average life
expectancy of women is higher than that of men. This is of great concern since the health of
men is no longer so much looked into as compared to women in the name of gender equality.
Men’s health is generally overlooked and hidden in plain sight.
Across the world men’s perception of the ‘male role’ inhibits important aspects of self-
care and health seeking habits (Cornwall et al, (2015)). This has led to deterioration of most
men’s health contributing to low life expectancy. It is greatly assumed that men can likely take
care of their health concerns as compared to women. Men tend also to be more commonly
involved in unhealthy social behaviors such as excessive drug consumption especially cigarettes
and alcohol intake, exposure to physical and chemical hazards especially in the work place and
negligence of health services such as screening (Hübner et al (2017)). In some countries like