Policy Approaches to Engaging Men and Boys in Achieving Gender Equality and Health Equity

This policy brief outlines the rationale for using policy approaches to engage men in achieving gender equality, reducing health inequities, and improving women’s and men’s health. It offers a framework for integrating men into policies that aim to reduce gender inequality and health inequities. It highlights some successful policy initiatives addressing men that have advanced gender equality and reduced health inequities by generating positive changes in men’s behaviours and relations with women and with other men. The document was prepared by the Department of Gender, Women and Health (GWH) of the World Health Organization (WHO).

The document emphasises the importance of work with men as a key to advancing gender equality, reducing health inequities, and improving the health of both genders. This involves changing men's harmful attitudes and roles so as to reconstruct gender relations, particularly involving the ‘gatekeepers’ of the current gender order through their responsibilities as decision-makers and leaders within their families and communities. Gender norms that include rigid notions of manhood and constructions of masculinity are cited as impairments to men's health and are implicated in gender inequalities. However, as stated here, men also have a positive role to play in fostering gender equality and good health. Some men already live in ‘gender-just’ ways: they respect and care for the women and girls in their lives, and they reject sexist and harmful norms of manhood.

Because issues of gender are a key focus for structural policy action, attention to carefully designing policies and interventions can bring about changes that improve women’s and men’s health and men’s gender-related attitudes and behaviours. This report identifies the key features of successful interventions as follows:

• use positive and affirmative messages;
  
• encourage men to reflect on the costs of hegemonic masculinity to men and women;
  
• use formative evidence-based research and ongoing monitoring and evaluation;
  
• recognise that men are not homogeneous and develop interventions that reflect men’s different life experiences;
  
• use an ecological approach that recognises the range of factors shaping gender roles and relations;
  
• use a range of social change strategies: community education; community mobilisation; media; policy development; and advocacy for implementation.

The document lists international agreements that mandate developing, implementing, and evaluating policy approaches on engaging men and boys in achieving gender equality and health equity. It addresses scaling programmes beyond the local work now being implemented. "To truly transform gender inequalities, it is necessary to go beyond scattered, small-scale interventions and efforts (no matter how effective), towards systematic, large scale and coordinated efforts." Guiding principles for integrating men into gender policy include:

• Frame policy and programming with men within an agenda that promotes human rights, including women’s rights. Policy on men and gender must:
  1. promote human rights, including the rights of women and girls;
     
  2. enhance boys’ and men’s lives;
     
  3. be inclusive of and responsive to diversities among men; and
     
  4. promote health equity.
     
• Address the social and structural determinants of gender inequalities and health inequities - "...the policy framework must draw attention to the need for a more just economic and social order."

   

Strategies for integrating men's issues into gender and health policy include the following:

1. In consultation with women’s organisations and other civil society groups, create an enabling environment in which appropriate policy frameworks on men, gender equality and health equity can be adopted and used.
   
2. "Mainstream" men into gender and health policy by including personnel with authority and resources in national health departments alongside those working on women's health in such a way that collaboration can occur.
   
3. Examine policies through a gender-focused lens.
   
4. Learn lessons from policies developed to promote women’s rights.
   
5. Scale up existing initiatives, particularly capacity building materials, methods, and approaches that are effective.

As stated here, building capacity and sustaining momentum will require:

• engaging men in the promotion of gender equality;
  
• engaging leadership and support from senior policy-makers and decision-makers;
• involving affected communities, including men who have sex with men; and
  
• using community health programmes, schools, and other existing structures to disseminate messages supporting gender equality via more equitable depictions of norms and roles and avoidance of language and content that perpetuate gender stereotypes and discrimination.
  

Collaboration with civil society organisations can increase effectiveness. Capacity building in both governmental structures and civil society organisations requires training and support to programme planning, organisational development, and management, as well as strengthening civil society capacity to monitor policy compliance and implementation.

The document includes examples of increasing men's involvement in: care of children; interventions in violence against women; practices of safer sex; male circumcision for HIV prevention; reducing excessive consumption of alcohol; and reducing gun violence.