Gender in Social Work: Promoting Equality

What are the patterns of male and female poverty? What is the difference between "trafficking" and "migration as a free decision of a woman"? What is the importance of gender in professional social work with multicultural groups? How should we address issues of sexuality and love in gender-conscious youth work? What are the gender aspects of developing/preventing addictions and responding to counselling and therapy? Do the professional motivations for me and women in social work differ? Does this result in a gender-based hierarchical structure? Are there gender-specific assumptions in social workers' perceptions of clients? Are boys and girls treated in the same way by social services? No one book can cover all the relevant gender aspects of social work. Moreover, reference to differences between men and women should not cause us to overlook the sometimes significant differences between members of the same gender resulting from social and cultural origin, sexual orientation, physique, education and age. But this collection of evidence and analysis from five countries takes us towards a systematic understanding of the impact of gender, which can in turn help promote equality. This publication is based on an inter-university co-operation project under the Socrates-Erasmus scheme for the development of the European module "Gender Aspects in Social Work" from 1997 to 2000. Most of the material in this text was originally published in German (Gruber and Froschl 2001, Vienna).