On the other hand, Mills said women should also receive the behavior change message. He cites HIV figures for discordant couples. These are couples where one person is HIV positive and the other is not.

“If we believe the way that the gender story has been told to us all these years, then in any discordant relationship you would expect the person who is HIV positive to be the male. But when you look at the evidence, actually about 50 percent of the time it’s the male and 50 percent of the time it’s the female. So, there are several different interpretations of this, but the best one is it appears that both genders go outside of their marriage,” he said.

He said women, whether African or not, often do better with health care because they are more in tune with their bodies. Also, women frequently learn of their HIV status while receiving care during pregnancy. Mills says when men access health care they are often in the late stage of disease.

Professor Mills has worked in Africa for 10 years, mostly in South Africa, Uganda and Rwanda.