The Women’s HIV/AIDS Epidemic
Facing the Facts
Center for Women Policy Studies
December 2006
Throughout the world, HIV/AIDS is a women’s epidemic.
- Half of the 38.6 million people living with HIV/AIDS globally are women; more than 17.3 million women in the world are HIV positive.1
- Almost all women diagnosed with HIV/AIDS (98 percent) live in developing countries – and 77 percent live in sub-Saharan Africa.2 Women are more than half (13.1 million) of all people living with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa (23 million).3
In the United States, HIV/AIDS is increasingly a women’s epidemic.
- Women are 25 percent of all people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in the United States in 2006.
- Although women were only 8 percent of people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in 1985, in 2005 women accounted for 27 percent of new diagnoses.4
- Women of color continue to be most affected. More than two thirds (67 percent) of all women living with HIV/AIDS are African American women and 16 percent are Latinas.5
- From the beginning of the epidemic through 2004, an estimated 84,897 women in the United States have died as a result of AIDS.6
The co-factors of HIV infection for women are women’s inequality and oppression, violations of women’s human rights, patriarchal traditions of male dominance, and the related epidemic of sexual violence against women.
- Throughout the world, 80 percent of women newly infected with HIV are faithful within a marriage or long-term relationship – their husbands/partners are not.7
- Laws and customs that prevent women from owning their own land or property deny them the opportunity to be economically independent. In fact, women own only 2 percent of the world’s land.8
- Trapped in poverty and at the mercy of their husbands’ financial generosity, many married women are in no position to negotiate for safe sex or abstinence.
- Reinforcing this vulnerability is the lack of education and access to educational opportunities that women and girls face all over the world – demonstrated by the fact that women are two thirds of the world’s 785 million illiterate adults.9
Young women between the ages of 13 and 25 are at extremely high risk of HIV/AIDS.
- Child marriage – early forced marriage of young girls – often truncates a girl’s access to education as she assumes household responsibilities, bears children and engages in manual labor.
- Girls are 60 percent of all children ages 7 to 18 worldwide who have never received any schooling.10
- For many girls, poverty keeps them out of school, as they cannot afford school fees. Many of these desperate young girls are forced to accept financial enticements from older men in exchange for sex – and the girls cannot insist on condom use in these circumstances.11
- But education can and does make a difference. In fact, the rate of HIV/AIDS infection among girls with “even some” schooling is nearly half that of uneducated girls around the world.12
- In the United States, 15 percent of women diagnosed with HIV/AIDS between 2001 and 2004 were young – between 13 and 24 years old.13
- In sub-Saharan Africa, three young women (ages 15 to 24) are diagnosed with HIV for every young man.14
Women’s most basic human rights – the right to bodily integrity and freedom from violence – are violated every day in every part of the world, mercilessly increasing their risk of HIV infection.
- Nearly 3 million women are killed each year by violence perpetrated upon them by a partner or spouse.15
- Women whose partners rape or batter them often have limited access to the law, even where laws are on the books to make battering a crime; for these women, negotiating or demanding condom use is a virtual impossibility.
- Women who must exchange sex for survival as a way of life are least able to negotiate condom use. While such exchanges include commercial sex work, they also include the economic and social realities of poverty that many women face and the patriarchal norms that give men control over women’s lives.16
Women worldwide lack access to woman-centered health care and treatment for HIV/AIDS – and often face extreme stigma and violence when they seek care.
- In the United States, women living with HIV/AIDS are less likely to receive prescriptions for the most effective treatments than are their male counterparts.17
- Even when treatment is available, many women and girls do not take advantage of it because of the legitimate fear of stigma and ridicule and the lack of confidentiality that makes acceptance of treatment tantamount to a public declaration of HIV positive status.18
- In many sub-Saharan African countries, the stigma is so powerful and so pervasive that many pregnant women forgo treatment that would prevent HIV transmission to the fetus.19
HIV prevention strategies cannot succeed unless they respond to the realities of women’s lives and are controlled by women.
- Since the beginning of the epidemic, the co-factors of the HIV/AIDS epidemic for women have been racism, sexism, poverty, patriarchy, sexual violence and homophobia.20
- Women are infected with HIV/AIDS by men they love, trust, fear – or need for economic security. In fact, throughout the world, HIV is spreading through heterosexual sex. In the United States, heterosexual sex accounts for 78 percent of all new HIV diagnoses in women.21
- To protect women from HIV infection, global HIV prevention programs and methods must be designed with women’s needs at their heart – not as an “add on” to existing male-centered efforts.
- In short, woman-controlled methods, particularly microbicides, are urgently needed. A microbicide – in the form of a gel, cream, film suppository or vagina ring, for example – is a “stealth” method of protection that a woman can use without the knowledge or consent of her partner.22
1 UNAIDS 2006 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic
2 34r Family Foundation, HIV/AIDS Policy Fact Sheet: The HIV/AIDS Epidemic in the United States, November 2005
5 Centers for Disease Control, HIV/AIDS Fact Sheet: A Glance at the HIV/AIDS Epidemic April 2006
6 Centers for Disease Control. Trends in HIV/AIDS diagnoses—33 states, 2001–2004. MMWR 2005; 54:1149–1153
7 HIV Prevention: How Effective is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR): Hearing Before the Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations, House of Representatives, 109th Congress (2006) (testimony of Helene Gayle).
8 UNFPA 2005 State of the World Population
9 UNFPA 2005 State of the World Population
10 UNFPA 2005 State of the World Population
11 UNAIDS, UNFPA and UNIFEM, Women and HIV/AIDS: Confronting the Crisis, 2004
12 UNFPA 2005 State of the World Population
13 Centers for Disease Control, Surveillance Findings May 2006
14 Kaiser Family Foundation, HIV/AIDS Policy Fact Sheet: The Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic, May 2006
15 Amnesty International, A Fact Sheet on Sexual Violence: A Human Rights Violation
16 World Health Organization, Human Rights, Women and HIV/AIDS: Fact Sheet No. 247 June 2000
17 Centers for Disease Control. Trends in HIV/AIDS diagnoses—33 states, 2001–2004. MMWR 2005; 54:1149–1153
18 UNAIDS, UNFPA and UNIFEM, Women and HIV/AIDS: Confronting the Crisis, 2004
19 Rosenberg, T. (2006, August 6). When A Pill Is Not Enough. The New York Times Magazine p.42-59
20 Center for Women Policy Studies. (1999). Building a national policy agenda: Ten principles for woman-focused HIV/AIDS prevention. Washington, DC: Author.
21 Centers for Disease Control. Trends in HIV/AIDS diagnoses—33 states, 2001–2004. MMWR 2005; 54:1149–1153
22 The Global Coalition on Women and AIDS, Increase Women’s Control over HIV Prevention: Fight AIDS Issue #4, 2006
