CSW67: Women's health improves when men are involved in care work
Women’s wellbeing improves when men are sensitised to support their maternal health and participate in care work.
What you need to know:
- Discriminatory gender norms limit women’s ability to make decisions relating to pregnancy, birth and childhood.
- To promote husbands’ engagement in their wives’ antenatal and postnatal journey, he suggested transforming health facilities to accommodate fathers.
Women’s wellbeing improves when men are sensitised to support their maternal health and participate in care work.
This emerged during a March 14 side event onEngaging Men for Gender Equality Event sponsored by World Vision Canada, at the 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW67) that ended on Friday.
The virtual event brought together participants from organisations championing inclusion and involvement of men and boys in ending gender inequalities.
Ms Mwivano Malimbwi, a project manager at World Vision Tanzania, oversaw implementation of a five-year project (2016-21) in Shinyanga and Singida regions on enhancing nutrition services to improve maternal and child health. She said engaging men in the project bore fruit.
At the end of the project, they established that the use of iron and folic acid by pregnant women had increased from 11.4 per cent to 51 per cent. Similarly, the use of mixed nutrients increased by 81 per cent. While at the same time, the number of pregnant women who attend at least four antenatal clinics increased.
“From the project, we realised that gender inequalities is a persistence barrier to women’s right to reproductive health,” she said.
Discriminatory gender norms limit women’s ability to make decision relating to pregnancy, birth and childhood, she said. "So engaging men to promote gender equality is very important given the fact that men have the ability to shift the dominant gender norms and challenge the patriarchal beliefs that drive inequality between men and women.”
Equimundo MenCare officer Wessel van den Berg said proper upbringing is pivotal to having a generation of men willing to take up care and domestic work. Equimundo is a United States of America non-governmental organisation promoting gender equality through involvement of men and boys.
“Men who grew up seeing their fathers very involved in care work are more likely to do care work themselves,” he said.
To promote husbands’ engagement in their wives’ antenatal and postnatal journey, he suggested transforming health facilities to accommodate fathers. “We also need to advocate for men to be more involved in early childhood development spaces.”
Further, governments ought to invest in subsidised high-quality childcare to free women’s time to engage in paid work, he said.
