Veiled Impact of Gender Equality Policies on Gender Disparities in Self-Rated Health: The Case of Turkey

Inequalities in health are resulted from many factors, including gender, race, ethnicity, class, level of education, quality of work, level of pay and living conditions, and so forth. Likewise, in the last decades, the number of studies on gender- based analysis of health inequalities have increased. Accordingly, various determinants of gender differences in health became the focus of much research which include the role of psychological (e.g. gender images and identities, chronic stressors), behavioural (smoking, drinking, eating, physical exercise), and social factors (e.g. social support, socioeconomic status) on women’s and men’s health. These studies demonstrated that gender disparities in health were for the most part socially and culturally produced, rather than biologically given (Annandale & Hunt, 2000). Several of these studies have also addressed the role of gender policies in eliminating gender inequalities in health. The main argument of these works is that gender inequalities in health are closely related to the socio- economic and political dimensions in which gender inequality is manifested in the world. As such they could be ameliorated and eradicated through gender equality policies. Since such studies are particularly limited for the Turkish context, this chapter aims to close this gap by focusing on the relation of gender equality policies and gender disparities in the self- rated health (SRH) index in Turkey based on the 2019 Turkey Health Interview Survey.