Health Inequality

Health inequality refers to measurable differences in health status, life expectancy, and exposure to illness between individuals or social groups, particularly those arranged by class, income, occupation, education, ethnicity, gender, and place. It is a central subject of medical sociology and social epidemiology, where researchers seek to explain why people who are poorer or lower in the social hierarchy tend to live shorter and less healthy lives. The Black Report of 1980 in Britain documented large class differences in mortality and proposed explanations including artefact, selection, behavioral and cultural factors, and material deprivation. Michael Marmot’s Whitehall studies revealed a social gradient, in which health improves with each step up the occupational ladder. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argued in The Spirit Level that more unequal societies have worse health outcomes overall, a claim that has been debated. Bruce Link and Jo Phelan’s fundamental cause theory and Nancy Krieger’s ecosocial approach emphasize the persistence of social conditions as drivers of disease. Health inequality remains vital for understanding poverty, power, welfare policy, and the unequal distribution of life chances.