Female-Dominated Health Sector Must Push Male Leaders To Achieve Gender Equality

Foreign Policy: The Crime of Gender Inequality in Global Health
Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer Prize winning science writer

“…Public health is the perfect example, both of this imbalance in power in a female-majority field and of the impact that inequity has on the activities and products produced by the profession. The majority of people working in health worldwide are female — by far. But the majority of their bosses and global leadership are men. … Global health seems a fitting place to start developing genuine systems of gender reciprocity and fairness. Well-managed and staffed public health and medical care are in all of our interests. Fairness and leadership are concepts we all understand but find difficult to implement in practice. Surely, we can start down the implementation road to leadership and fairness with professions that are already overwhelmingly female. And maybe, once the 90 percent of America’s nurses have equal pay and power with their 10 percent male counterparts, we can take on more ambitious targets, like legislatures, oval-shaped offices, and the boardrooms of the Fortune 500” (12/26).

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