Gender, poverty and location: how much difference do they make in the geography of health inequalities?

It is often said that women live longer than men, but suffer more illnesses throughout their lives. It has also been demonstrated in various studies of women’s health that measures of health and health behaviour vary over different geographic scales. Added into this mix is the fact that historically more women than men in relative terms are found on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder. What has not been so well-developed is our understanding of the connections among health, gender, poverty and especially location. In 1998, Statistics Canada released the second wave of the National Population Health Survey (NPHS-2). Included with the NPHS-2 public use microdata file are measures of health status, gender, income and location which can be analyzed in the form of logistic regression models. Results are reported which provide a better understanding of the relative roles that gender, poverty and location play in the geography of inequalities.