Despite making up three-quarters of the public health workforce, women remain outnumbered in one key and vital area: leadership.
Women make up 45 per cent of public hospital board chairs, 39 per cent of private hospital CEOs and 38 per cent of state and federal chief medical or health officers.
Now, the Women in Public Health (WPH) initiative is aiming to shift the numbers, highlighting how women bring different skills, approaches and values to leadership.
The WPH initiative launches today, following conversations across the sector about the need to address inequity in public health leadership.
The network aims to connect women at all stages of their careers across the country, to support women working across the healthcare sector, research, politics and advocacy.
With 26 founding members including public health CEOs, MPs, professors and leaders of major associations, the WPH network will highlight inequities in public health leadership and the value of diverse women’s voices. It also aims to elevate women into more public policy discussions and media opportunities, and connect women working across all areas of public health.
Caterina Giorgi (pictured above), founding member and CEO of the Foundation for Alcohol Research Education (Fare), says through conversations with women in public health they know hurdles remain for women. These include being overlooked for promotion, unequal pay, online abuse, sexual harassment and discrimination.
Such challenges don’t only hinder the careers of women directly affected, but ultimately get in the way of achieving more diversity in leadership.
“The inequality that exists in leadership even contributes to poor health outcomes through the gender bias where women’s health conditions are under-researched, untreated, and undiagnosed,” Giorgi said.
Another founding member, GP and Independent MP for Mackellar Sophie Scamps, said there’s much to be gained from bringing more women into public health leadership positions, including the benefits that come from a greater focus on health equity, primary health care delivery, disease prevention and health promotion.
“While many of these issues may not be on the frontier of medical innovation and thus less attractive to investment, they certainly would make a greater impact at the population level and ease the burden on and cost of our hospital system,” she said.
“Women often bring different skills, values and leadership styles which are particularly successful and valuable in the healthcare context. During the COVID-19 pandemic we witnessed countries with female leadership perform significantly better at a population level in responding to the threat.”
Meanwhile, founding member Nicole Hewlett, Project Manager for The First Nations Cancer & Wellbeing Research Team, believes we will see a shift in priorities with more women in leadership, which could include better supporting the wellbeing of the healthcare workforce and building the capacity of the workforce to deliver high quality, culturally-responsive support and services to others.
“I also believe there would be a deeper understanding and appreciation of relationship-based healthcare models where patients and health professionals are equal partners that engage in two-way decision making in order for health care to be tailored to meet the needs of diverse Australians, more holistically,” she said.
Hewlett says it’s the opportunity to promote “equity” that encouraged her to get involved.
“For me, equity sits with healing, hope and justice and while I want that for all societies in Australia, I especially want this for our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, to whom history has been deeply unjust and unkind to. I hope my involvement gives visibility that our women can be in positions of leadership and make meaningful changes that not only brings healing, hope and justice to our local communities but to ourselves, also.”
She believes women are still contending with unconscious and even conscious expectations that women should stay silent, which makes it difficult for women then to be heard.
“I feel this plays out in two ways,” she said. “Firstly, women experience numerous barriers to access leadership opportunities and if we are successful, the attitudes, treatment and regard towards a woman in leadership is, more often than not, challenging. Secondly, many of us have internalised the unconscious societal messages about women and as such we often underestimate and undervalue ourselves and feel unworthy or like an imposter if we are successful in positions of leadership.
Scamps said that a number of factors stand in the way of women getting into health leadership, including those that are similar across other industries too — like family responsibilities and part-time work, and also women believing they may not have the qualifications to apply for the roles that do come up.