Introduction

Gender Transformative Health Promotion: An Introduction

Unit 1: What is gender transformative health promotion? This unit examines how both gender differences and gender inequalities can give rise to inequities between men and women in health status and access to health care. It introduces a Framework for Gender-transformative Health Promotion to explore how health promotion can contribute to gender transformation to enhance both health and gender equity.

Unit 2: Creating gender transformative health promotion interventions. Building on basic principles, this unit examines how to incorporate key principles of gender transformative practice into a project planning cycle, the value of engagement with a community of practice, strategies for advocacy in health promotion, and how gender-transformative health promotion is related to work being conducted in other settings including international development, women’s health activism, health care reform, and decolonisation practices.

Unit 3: Approaches to integrating gender in health promotion. Unit 3 demonstrates how we can assess our current level of gender integration in the health promotion field. It allows us to ask “How can our health promotion activities move towards being more transformative?”

Unit 4: Gender transformative health promotion in practice. While there is no single approach to doing gender transformative health promotion, this unit explores the “how-to” of gender transformative health promotion. It looks at a range of examples with different populations, in different contexts, and different health issues to help in considering how to begin doing gender transformative health promotion in your own context.

Learning Objectives

After completing this course, you should be able to:

  • Describe key principles of gender transformative health promotion
  • Understand how to develop, plan and evaluate gender transformative health promotion activities
  • Demonstrate understanding of different approaches to gender integration in health promotion
  • Demonstrate increased knowledge and confidence in applying principles of gender transformative health promotion to your own work

The interdisciplinary research team involved in developing gender transformative health promotion training materials was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Institute of Gender and Health.