Private financing in health - what does this mean for gender equality?

123—144 An established body of literature has starkly demonstrated the gendered impacts of privatization of ‘the social’ in the context of economic reforms in the 1980s and 1990s including the implications for the health sector. Nevertheless, we have seen a continued expansion of the role of the private sector to finance and deliver health care services and the increased financialization of the health sector evident for example in the growth of private health insurance companies and private finance initiatives for health care infrastructure. In this chapter we consider what these trends mean in a Latin American context, and, drawing more specifically on examples from Chile and Peru, we reflect on some of the limitations of this development from a gender perspective and interrogate some of the gendered assumptions that underpin this trend. We consider what the gendered implications of these processes are for a future research agenda.