جنس ضعیف تر؟ کشف درک غیر از تفاوت های جنسیتی در امید به زندگی: یک مطالعه کیفی

Despite increasing interest in gender and health, ‘lay’ perceptions of gender differences in mortality have been neglected. Drawing on semi-structured interview data from 45 men and women in two age cohorts (born in the early 1950s and 1970s) in the UK, we investigated lay explanations for women's longer life expectancy. Our data suggest that respondents were aware of women's increased longevity, but found this difficult to explain. While many accounts were multifactorial, socio-cultural explanations were more common, more detailed and less tentative than biological explanations. Different socio-cultural explanations (i.e. gendered social roles, ‘macho’ constraints on men and gender differences in health-related behaviours) were linked by the perception that life expectancy would converge as men and women's lives became more similar. Health behaviours such as going to the doctor or drinking alcohol were often located within wider structural contexts. Female respondents were more likely to focus on women's reproductive and caring roles, while male respondents were more likely to focus on how men were disadvantaged by their ‘provider’ role. We locate these narratives within academic debates about conceptualising gender: e.g. ‘gender as structure’ versus ‘gender as performance’, ‘gender as difference’ versus ‘gender as diversity’.

Studies of ‘lay’ perceptions of health and illness can advance understandings of individual health choices and inform health education and social policy (Blaxter, 1997). Most commentators agree that ‘lay’ people have sophisticated understandings of health and illness, based on intimate knowledge of family members over the lifecourse, social networks and media accounts (Davison et al., 1992 and Hunt and Emslie, 2001; also see Bury, 1997 and Prior, 2003 for useful overviews of the changing status of ‘lay’ perceptions in medical sociology). Gender plays a key role in lay perceptions of health and health practices. Following West and Zimmerman (1987), we conceptualise gender as a dynamic set of socially constructed relationships embedded in everyday interaction, rather than as a simple attribute of individuals. ‘Doing’ gender means consciously or unconsciously creating differences which are then often viewed as ‘natural’ distinctions between men and women. This emphasis on ‘difference’ between men and women creates binary ways of thinking and being. As Annandale and Clark (1996) suggest: “we artificially, and inappropriately, divide people into two camps…we build a series of other characteristics on top of gender i.e. women are unhealthy, men are healthy; women are irrational, men are rational and so on…real life experience is not like this; attributes and experiences like acting rationally or being healthy cross-cut gender and are not the province of men or women as a group” (p. 22).