Legislation's blind spot
By Angela Matheson
Women's health is worse than men's. They suffer injuries from sexual and domestic violence, are more susceptible to drug addiction and depression and are poorer than men.
Women, in fact, are "significantly disadvantaged and warrant special attention", according to the Human Rights commissioner, Sir Ronald Wilson, who presided over the recent case in which Dr Alex Proudfoot and two other men claimed that ACT women's health centres are discriminatory and should be shut down because no similar health services are provided for men.
Wilson decided that women's health services should stay.
After weighing up dozens of affidavits which poured in from women's groups, the Health Department and women MPs, he ruled that women's health centres are discriminatory but are not unlawful because they "help relieve continuing disadvantage" which women suffer.
Things could easily have gone the other way. Australia's anti-discrimination legislation does not acknowledge women as a disadvantaged gender. Men and women are treated as a homogeneous group, and the country is regarded as a level playing field where both sexes have equal resources and rights.
This time, women have been lucky. With a less sympathetic commissioner, women could have lost their right to health centres. And workers at the Canberra Women's Health Centre, the centre specifically targeted by Proudfoot, think women's access to health services should not be a matter of luck.
That the case actually got so far, they argue, shows the dangers for women of gender-blind sex discrimination legislation.
The Sex Discrimination Act of 1986 prohibits discrimination on the grounds of sex but does not acknowledge the historic and continuing inequality experienced by Australian women.
Because of this, Proudfoot was entitled to use considerable public time, money and resources to argue that men in the ACT were discriminated against because, unlike women, their special health needs are not met. Men, he pointed out, die younger than women. While 50% of men live to the age of 76, 50% of women live to 85. Also, men, and particularly younger men, commit suicide more frequently than women.
While women hog health resources, argued Proudfoot, men are taught to be ashamed of illness and weakness and are made to feel embarrassed when they get sick.
Wilson said he accepted that a case might be made for government to give more attention to men's specific health care needs, but could not accept that men's needs were comparable to women's.
He said it would be a "strange way" of dealing with the unmet health needs of men by dismantling the services provided for the health needs of women.
A federal report into sex discrimination legislation due to next month has recommended that the legislation be redrawn to acknowledge the existence of gender inequality. Until then, sex discrimination legislation is in danger of being used to attack the logical rights and services hard won by women, which were neglected in the past.