The misconceptions about men, women and HIV

Here’s one to challenge your preconceptions about men, women, sex and HIV by Wisdom of Whores author Elizabeth Pisani.

This should be food for thought, especially for the gender champions who tend to think that education and empowerment would solve much of society’s ills and reduce the rate of HIV infections.

Men are pigs, women are angels. Not.

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Yesterday at 1:17am

As promised, data on women, autonomy, partnerships and HIV. It’s quite true that I have not developed some magic indicator of “autonomy”. But the World Economic Forum has. Or at least its Gender Equality Index is as close as damnit. Let’s take the sub-Saharan African countries at either extreme, and set their equality index against their HIV rates:

On individual measures that are often indicators of women’s ability to make their own choices and decisions — educational level, for example, we see a strong correlation too, both at the national level:

and at the household level:

So, in countries where women are more equal to men on measures of workforce and political participation as well as education, there’s more HIV than in countries where women are more constrained. In countries where women are more educated, there’s more HIV. Within countries, more educated women are more likely to be infected with HIV.

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