Gita Sen

Priorities for research on equity and health: towards an equity-focused health research agenda.

Piroska Östlin and colleagues argue that a paradigm shift is needed to keep the focus on health equity within the social determinants of health research agenda.

Gendered Labour Markets and Globalisation in Asia

This paper argues that processes of economic globalisation have significantly transformed labour markets in Asia during the last three decades. A central feature of this transformation is the growing importance of female labour at the core of economic processes. This feature has been extensively discussed by feminist economists and anthropologists but received relatively little attention in macro-policy debates. At best, policies towards women workers are viewed as welfare measures of primary interest to the women themselves. The paper argues that such a view is short-sighted and its limitations are becoming evident in the context of the recent economic crisis.Gender-biased or “gendered” labour markets, as we call them, are not only a problem for women workers. They also trap economies on the so-called low road of labour-intensive growth, making it difficult to garner the full fruits of growth, or to ensure its sustainabililty. Sustainable human development focused on the conditions of women’s participation in labour markets can lay a firmer grounding for sustained increased in income per capita. Sustainability in the paper is viewed along three dimensions – human development, the gains from trade and integration into the global economy, and resilience in the face of economic shocks such as the recent crisis.The paper is divided into three main sections:1) The implications of globalisation for the transformation of labout markets2) The micro and macro implications of gendered labour markets, and3) The policy implications of gendered labour markets under gloablisation

A response to Bates, Hankivsky and Springer on the WHO Knowledge Network on Women and Gender Equity Commission on Social Determinants of Health

0277-9536/

Inequalities and Health in India

– see front matter 2009 Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2009.07.022 We are writing as co-coordinators of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health’s (CSDH) Knowledge Network on Women and Gender Equity whose task was to produce a synthetic report (referred to near the end of the commentary) based on a set of commissioned background papers and detailed discussion and feedback among the members of the Network. We too, like Bates (2009), would have loved to see the Final Report of the CSDH (CSDH, 2008a) deal with intersectionality, masculinity and a critique of gender mainstreaming, since all these were discussed in great depth in our own report (Sen, Östlin, & George, 2007). However, we are also aware that it can be difficult in a synthetic Final Report (drawing on the work of nine different knowledge networks, the views of different commissioners, inputs from civil society and numerous others) to pick up all the nuances. Undoubtedly, similar comments could be made about the way in which the Final Report has dealt with the work of many of the other Knowledge Networks. One could of course quarrel with the way in which the Final Report used or dealt with the inputs from the Knowledge Network. But in that process, we would hope that the commentary would not lead to the misleading conclusion that the issues were not addressed at all. While the Final Report certainly has central importance, it isn’t the only product of the CSDH. One of the ways in which the CSDH has attempted to address the inevitable problems of limited space in its Final Report is by putting much of the background material in the public domain. The report of the Women and Gender Equity Knowledge Network is available on a variety of websites and has been widely quoted (see Bierman, 2007; Reid, 2009). A Spanish translation will shortly be available on the Pan American Health Association (PAHO) website (http://new. paho.org/hq). Short versions of the background papers of our