Gender transformative health promotion aims to redefine harmful gender norms, challenge gender stereotypes and develop more equitable gender roles and relationships.
Health promotion is not only about promoting healthy living, but also about promoting healthy communities, healthy public policy, and well-being.
The World Health Organization defines health promotion as “the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health.” To achieve this, health promotion strategies seek to positively influence health through a range of individual, community-based and population interventions. Health promotion is not merely about promoting healthy “lifestyle choices”, but is also about changing social conditions to create healthy communities, healthy public policy, and increase well-being.
If you have not yet seen the Gender Equity Through Health Promotion website, check out the site and the wealth of information and resources it offers! The site gives you:
- This website offers practical tools, online training, and information about gender transformative health promotion.
- These resources have been developed for a range of health and social service professionals, as well as students, researchers, program managers, policy makers, and anyone concerned with improving health promotion.
- Using the resources on this website will help in developing the skills to design, plan and evaluate a wide range of health promotion activities that also aim to reduce gender inequities.
While many of the resources on this website use examples from women’s health, the principles of gender transformation apply equally to men’s health concerns and are based on an understanding of how gender inequity can also negatively affects boys and men. Gender transformative health promotion is interested in improving outcomes for all: women, men, girls and boys.
Want to learn more about Gender Transformative Health Promotion? Read their powerpoint!
