Policy directions to improve women's health beyond reproduction

cover various aspects of women’s health that are not limited to the reproductive years. Taken together, they highlight persistent failures to address women’s critical health needs. Huge diversity in health service provision prevails as countries move through their health transition. In general, however, health systems, especially in low- and middle-income countries, are not responsive to women’s needs and perspectives throughout the life course, even though women remain the greatest users of health care. Many women do not have access to the health services that they need beyond those that focus on a narrow range of objectives linked to reproductive health and infectious dis-ease control.The list of neglected women’s health issues is long. Countries are not adapt-ing quickly enough to the epidemio-logic changes resulting from evolving lifestyles and the rapid ageing of the population: specifically, the inexorable shift of the main causes of death and disease away from infectious diseases and towards noncommunicable dis-eases. Although this shift is observed in both men and women, women are particularly affected because, since they tend to live longer than men, they outnumber men in the older age groups. In 2012, the ratio of 60-year-old women to men in the world was 100:84. The proportion of women in the population rises with advancing age, so that at the age of 80 years, the ratio of women to men becomes 100:61.