Events:
BSG Conference Symposia
The World Health Organisation’s World Report on the Social Determinants of Health Equity (May 2025) highlights stark global disparities in life expectancy and the persistent social gradients in health that operate within national contexts. Importantly, it emphasises that ill health is shaped by determinants beyond the health sector, including housing, education, and employment opportunities. This life-course perspective encourages gerontologists to look beyond contemporary experiences and consider how inequalities accumulate over time. The SIG is holding two linked panels on health inequalities and their causes.
Symposia 1: Inequalities in Health and Health Access in Majority World Countries
Symposia 1 foregrounds intra-national variation in later-life health and wellbeing, moving beyond broad comparisons that can obscure the specificity of local communities and sub-populations. Presentations explore how inequalities are produced through lived care trajectories, including navigation of under-resourced public services, the shifting of care responsibilities onto families, and exclusionary dynamics that can emerge under conditions of scarcity. Particular attention is given to the role of place, with sharp disparities between urban centres and regional or rural areas, shaping pathways to healthcare. The panel highlights how health inequalities intersect with wider determinants beyond the clinical sphere, including housing conditions, changing family structures, disability and functional impairment, and the availability of long-term care systems. By offering grounded insights into the intersecting forces that produce unequal ageing within countries this panel contributes to a growing agenda in global gerontology that seeks to understand later-life inequalities not only between nations, but within them, as outcomes of deeply embedded social and structural gradients.
Presenters
- Inequality in functional impairment among older adults in Africa using the Washington Group Short Set on Functioning (WG-SS) Scale
Gloria Lang - The Patient Journey for People with Dementia and their Carers in Peru: From First Symptoms to Diagnosis and Treatment
Jemma Hawkins & Daniela Rossini-Vilchez - Housing and Ageing in Brazil: A portrait of the mismatches between traditional expectations of care and contemporary urban living
Karla Giacomin, Yeda Duarte & Emilene Zitkus - Navigating Inequality in a Constrained Healthcare System: Older Adults’ Experiences of Access and Exclusion during COVID-19 in Peru
Gabriela Ramos Bonilla
Symposia 2: Identifying and contextualising the causes of the Social Gradient in Health and Wellbeing
Symposia 2 raises our gerontological gaze to the wider structural factors that drive health inequality in later life. It foregrounds multi-scalar forces that reach from the international scale to the individual and from the past to the present. Presentations explore how economies are structured and harnessed to other economies, thereby producing later life inequalities that are carried forward into future generations. They reveal how economies exploit gendered scripts to disadvantage men and women. The panel ends with older people’s understanding of how engagement across economies creates unequal ageing, By offering insights into the way economies are and have been articulated to produce unequal ageing, this panel demonstrates the need to ground later lives in approaches that go beyond methodological nationalism while framing those understandings within indigenous categories.
Presenters
Articulated economies, male international labour migration and later life : comparing the Tajikistan and Lesotho experiences
Dr Swetlana Torno1, Dr Penny Vera-Sanso2
Who Cares for Older Persons in South Africa? A Socio-Political Analysis of Family Caregiving of Older Persons
Prof Elena Moore
Descent to indignity: Health disparity and well-being of destitute widows in rural Bengal
Dr. Sayendri Panchadhyayi
Ageing unequally: Indigenous theory and Storykeeper’s analysis framework for ageing inequalities in low-welfare contexts.
Dr Eucharia Igbafe