The idea that empowering women will lead to better lives for themselves and their families has been widely advocated. Yet its application has not been integrated into our health care systems or in the delivery of services. These women are less able to gain respect and negotiate with the health care system, less likely to have a personal physician and therefore poorly positioned to receive quality health care. Given such a scenario, women, in general, have not participated in defining issues relevant to themselves. One result of this has been that there are very few studies on women and health.
Research relating specifically to women's health issues is recent.
Before then, issues relating to women were extrapolated from research done on men. It is frequently ignored that the world's largest continent encompasses countries with very diverse socioeconomic and political histories, languages, cultures, experiences, religions, economic and political structures. Even their reasons for immigrating to the US are multifarious and includes people who have immigrated recently as well as those whose ancestry in the US can be traced to several generations with very unique and separate histories. After World War II, in 1965, with the liberalization of immigration laws, immigrants from Asia included those who were well educated in their home countries. Researchers should account for the cultural context of the group in which the research is being conducted.