Gender, Lifespan and Quality of Life ― An International Perspective

This publication addresses the gender dimensions of people’s lived experience and emphasizes how gender relationships differentially impact on women’s and girls’ as well as men’s and boys’ subjective well-being across the lifespan. It therefore fills a significant gap in the literature on quality of life and subjective well-being. The book brings together research which compares female’s and male’s subjective experiences of well-being at various life stages from a variety of countries and regions, particularly focusing on women’s subjective well-being. Sex-disaggregation of data on objective conditions of quality of life is now routinely undertaken in many countries of the world. However, despite the burgeoning of objective data on sex differences in life conditions across the world, very little gender analysis is carried out to explain fully such difference and there is still a serious dearth of data on gender differences in subjective experiences of quality of life and well-being. This publication will assist researchers, teachers, service providers and policy makers in filling some of the gaps in currently available literature on the nexus between age and gender in producing differential experiences of subjective wellbeing.

Professor Elizabeth Eckermann (M.A., Ph.D.) has a personal chair in medical sociology at Deakin University in Australia. Her research grants, publications and keynote addresses cover women's health, reproductive health, gender and health, domestic violence, eating disorders, quality of life and indicators of health status, health promotion and public health. She currently is conducting research in Lao PDR and Malaysia using a Diamond Dialogue Tool to evaluate well-being outcomes from health intervention programs. Professor Eckermann is a Distinguished Research Fellow of the International Society for Quality of life Studies and recipient of the Zonta International Outstanding Achievement Award for her commitment to the advancement of women. She is associate editor of the international journal Health Promotion International. She teaches sociology of health and illness, and supervises postgraduate candidates in sociology of health, quality of life and sociology of the body. Professor Eckermann has been on the Australian delegation to the United Nations as the women's health expert and undertaken more than 20 consultancies on gender and health issues for the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva and throughout the Western Pacific Region.