6t msm download tool package does not exist solution
Yet a key omission from most policy and research is first and foremost the recognition of multiple intersecting social identities and next an acknowledgment of how the intersection of multiple interlocking identities at the micro level reflects multiple and interlocking structural-level inequality at the macro levels of society. This priority is further reflected in public health and biomedical journals, which are replete with health disparities research. The aforementioned DHHS report on health disparities and the even newer National Prevention Strategy 8 assert that the reduction and elimination of health disparities are a top national public health priority. 4–7 Far from being just an exercise in semantics, intersectionality provides the discipline of public health with a critical unifying interpretive and analytical framework for reframing how public health scholars conceptualize, investigate, analyze, and address disparities and social inequality in health. Intersectionality is a theoretical framework for understanding how multiple social identities such as race, gender, sexual orientation, SES, and disability intersect at the micro level of individual experience to reflect interlocking systems of privilege and oppression (i.e., racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism) at the macro social-structural level. The other critical step is recognizing how systems of privilege and oppression that result in multiple social inequalities (e.g., racism, heterosexism, sexism, classism) intersect at the macro social-structural level to maintain health disparities.Įnter intersectionality. Acknowledging the existence of multiple intersecting identities is an initial step in understanding the complexities of health disparities for populations from multiple historically oppressed groups. This acknowledgment illustrates another conjunction problem-that of the “or.” Pursuant to this logic, one’s sexual orientation or gender identity or race/ethnicity may have an adverse effect on health, but nowhere in the report is there any indication of how the intersection of being, for example, a low-income Black gay or bisexual man might influence health. The introduction to the US Department of Health and Human Service’s (DHHS’s) recent HHS Action Plan to Reduce Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities acknowledges thatĬharacteristics such as race or ethnicity, religion, SES, gender, age, mental health, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity, geographic location, or other characteristics historically linked to exclusion or discrimination are known to influence health status. The notion that social identities are multiple and interlocking is not limited to the women and minorities discourse. Thus, in addition to being vague, the term minority in conjunction with women obscures the existence of multiple intersecting categories as exemplified by, for instance, a low-income Latina lesbian with a physical disability.
Although it typically modifies race/ethnicity in the United States, minority also can reference populations such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people people with physical and mental disabilities or, depending on geographic context, White people.
Missing is the notion that these 2 categories could intersect, as they do in the lives of racial/ethnic minority women.įurther compounding the issue is that the word minority is multidefinitional. The problem with the “women and minorities” statement or the “ampersand problem” 2 (p22) is the implied mutual exclusivity of these populations. amended guidelines provide guidance on including women and minorities as participants in research and reporting on sex/gender and racial/ethnic differences. Take, for example, the NIH Policy and Guidelines on the Inclusion of Women and Minorities as Subjects in Clinical Research. The term women and minorities is ubiquitously wedded in public health discourse, policy, and research.