Joyce Gelb and M.L. Palley, Women and Public Policies, 1982

JOYCE GELB AND M.L. PALLEY, WOMEN AND PUBLIC POLICIES, 1982
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Women and Public policy
For over several decades women have been disregarded by many societies in the world. They have discriminated in public policy with perception of weak gender. However, there have been positive changes taking place in the modern societies. For instance, Joyce Gelb & M.L. Palley, (1982) in their book entitled "Women and Public Policies" described in detail the cultural and changing patterns that affect women in American society. The changes includes ethnicity, race, class, political and religion. The authors illustrated the relationship between public policy and cultural changes with the increasing number of women in public offices and their contribution in the electoral force. The authors developed three models to illustrate these changes, the first model deals with policy changes in attitude and composition, second model tries to analyses the interaction policy between groups and the third model evaluate the positive changes that have occurred over a period of time.
The whole book can be summarized into three parts; institutional perceptions toward women, roles of women in the family and how economy affects the women. How the institution regards women in term of job placements and pensionable? Insurance companies in America society have discriminated women over the past years. Among other areas discussed widely are the changes in the education and health. For example the authors argue that most decision made concerning health care of the family rely soles on the man. Although women are recipients of primary health care such as reproductive and prenatal services, they hardly participate in decision making (Gelb & Palley, 57). Also most of the researches done on lifestyle disease like heart diseases tend to ignore women because researches involve men rather than ladies. The policy that states health care is gender neutral model is far from being true in American society considering all these happenings. It can be stated that poor health services received by women yet they live longer than men, compromises the general well-being of the society health wise. The authors refer to these factors that tend to ignore women in health care as "policy silences".
In education sectors, women have equal opportunity with men. In fact in some lea...