Marketing, Marginalization, Medicalization, and Motherhood: A Gender Analysis of Health Education Programs Offered to Women and Men

Abstract

I used multiple methods to study gender issues associated with health lectures that hospitals offer to the public. My purpose was not to evaluate the health-related content, but rather to study the gender messages that accompanied the health messages. One main reason hospitals offered lectures was to attract clients. While many lectures were offered to both sexes, women's lectures outnumbered men's lectures ten to one. One reason to target women was because hospitals offered more services to women than to men. Yet a main finding is that many women's offerings were not based solely on providing services to benefit women themselves, but also on assumptions about women's caregiving of others. Thus, while men were generally marketed to as men, women were often marketed to as mothers or other caregivers. Most speakers engaged in marginalization: while both men and women lecture attendees were treated in ways that denied their status as competent adults, women were also marginalized as women, that is, treated as "other" to a male norm. Additionally, some speakers presented a single interpretation of procedures or conditions as the only interpretation, despite the fact that other interpretations were equally plausible. Examples included offering positive interpretations of unpleasant screening procedures or treatments; attributing gender roles to biology; and attributing women's stress to personality traits. Medicalization and other forms of boundary blurring between health and other topics occurred more frequently for women than men. While some of this difference did not represent gender inequality, some did, such as gender differences in the emphasis placed on physical appearance. Similarly, while all exhibits showing men's nudity were medically instructive, that is, used to demonstrate anatomy or self-examination procedures, some women's nudity was not medically instructive, and thus unnecessary While some caregiving resources were offered to both sexes, many were offered only to women. Targeting caregiving resources to women went beyond merely reflecting the gendered division of caregiving; it also symbolically reproduced it. Further, when "women's" health resources were intended to benefit children and husbands, the boundary between self and others was blurred for women in a way that had no counterpart for men.