The need for feminist intersectionality in digital health

Area of Science:

• Digital Health
• Gender Equity
• Health Disparities

Background:

• The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital health adoption, including mobile health apps and telemedicine.
• The pandemic's socioeconomic impacts disproportionately affected women, increasing domestic violence, unemployment, and unpaid care work, thereby worsening health outcomes.
• While digital health offers potential benefits like improved healthcare access and data empowerment for women, it often fails to address gender inequities.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze how digital health, despite its potential, disadvantages women, especially those from racial or ethnic minority backgrounds.
• To highlight the role of unequal access, exclusion from app design, leadership gender imbalance, and harmful stereotypes in perpetuating gender inequities in digital health.
• To introduce a feminist intersectionality framework for addressing gender disparities in digital health and propose future research directions.

Main Methods:

• This viewpoint analyzes the intersection of digital health, gender, and equity.
• It examines existing literature and identifies systemic issues within digital health development and deployment.
• A feminist intersectionality framework is proposed as a lens to understand and address these complex issues.

Main Results:

• Digital health technologies are currently disadvantaging women, particularly women of color, due to limited access and exclusionary design practices.
• Gender imbalances in digital health leadership and the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes contribute to these inequities.
• The current trajectory of digital health risks exacerbating existing gender-based health disparities.

Conclusions:

• Urgent attention is needed to tackle the gender inequities embedded within digital health.
• Implementing a feminist intersectionality framework is crucial for designing inclusive and equitable digital health solutions.
• Future research should focus on co-designing digital health tools with diverse women and promoting gender equity in digital health leadership.