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Gendered Institutions in Global Health

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Women and Global Health Leadership

Abstract

Claire Somerville uses the feminist concept of gendered institutions to view how labour is divided in global health. Her starting position is that global health and its constituent networks and institutions are gendered entities acting within a neoliberal environment, which helps explain why and how they are ordered. Her analysis helps explain why popular mechanisms to promote gender parity found within gender mainstreaming approaches can become co-opted and defanged by patriarchal institutions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Understood here to be constructed through targets, parity goals, quotas, gender trainings, performance indicators, gender budgeting, monitoring, or any number of other gender mainstreaming technologies of governance (Prugl, 2011).

  2. 2.

    The use of institutions and their networks is intentional. The politics and exercise of power in geopolitical constellations are shown in the literature to determine global health agendas and prioritizations (Shiffman et al., 2016; Shiffman & Smith, 2007, etc.), but to date no theorizing or evidence around the gendered dimensions, let alone the place of women, in such networks has been forthcoming. For this reason, I include as global health not only its institutions—old and new—but also the emergence of global health networks and their functioning that politically prioritize the global health agenda (Shiffman et al., 2015, 2016; Heller et al., 2019).

  3. 3.

    At the Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women, 189 member states unanimously agreed the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action that prioritized gender mainstreaming as a mechanism to achieve gender equality.

  4. 4.

    This line of argument is in reference to Fraser’s theorizing on the globalizing financialized capitalism of the third regime of capitalism, the crisis of care, and role of “affective labour” and care work.

  5. 5.

    The economic, political, and ideological neoliberalization of global health, it is argued, drives inequities.

  6. 6.

    Interviews conducted by Somerville during 2017–2018.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Gender Centre, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland

    Claire Somerville

Authors
  1. Claire Somerville
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Claire Somerville .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Rosemary Morgan

  2. Pamoja Communications Ltd., Research in Gender and Ethics (RinGs), Brighton, East Sussex, UK

    Kate Hawkins

  3. Women in Global Health, Washington, DC, USA

    Roopa Dhatt

  4. Department of Health Policy and Management, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA

    Mehr Manzoor

  5. Women in Global Health, Washington, DC, USA

    Sulzhan Bali

  6. Michael Kirby Centre for Public Health and Human Rights, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

    Cheryl Overs

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Somerville, C. (2022). Gendered Institutions in Global Health. In: Morgan, R., Hawkins, K., Dhatt, R., Manzoor, M., Bali, S., Overs, C. (eds) Women and Global Health Leadership. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84498-1_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84498-1_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-84497-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-84498-1

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