Gender discrimination in healthcare in India

R. N. Pandey, Government of India
S. K. Mukhopadhyay, Government of India

In this paper, with the use of data from 60th round (January - June 2004) survey on morbidity and health care conducted by National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO), an attempt has been made to examine the gender discrimination in the household in terms of hospitalisation, medical expenditure, type of medical facilities used, etc. This paper clearly brings out the gender discrimination in medical attention among the household members. On an average a male member of a household was hospitalised for higher number of times than females during the reference period. Further, due to financial reasons, a higher proportion of female ailments were not treated in both rural and urban areas. Moreover, in the rural areas, a higher percentage of non-treated female ailments were not treated since the ailments were not considered serious.The expenditure in the hospitalization as well as non-hospitalisation cases was much higher for males as compared to females.