#Sexual harassment forcing women out of health care: global study

Women in health care are looking out for us, but who’s looking out for them?

A new initiative by Women in Global Health, an international gender equality advocacy group, is warning of a “shadow pandemic” among women, prompted by lockdown measures and a lack of resources amid the coronavirus outbreak.

The crisis is especially acute for women in the clinical care setting, where women make up seven in 10 of the workforce.

“Women are exhausted and planning to leave the profession,” said the organization’s executive director Dr. Roopa Dhatt in a statement, according to a report in the Independent. “Health workers in around 90 countries have gone on strike. This is the point — a break in history — to turn this around. This is not a women’s issue, it is a global health security issue,” she said.

Compared to men, women have lost more jobs, taken on more unpaid work, experienced more gaps in their personal needs, such as reproductive health services, cancer screenings and education and suffered an increase in domestic violence, to name just a few recent setbacks.

In an open letter published in the British Medical Journal blog ahead of the G7 summit held in June, Women in Global health urged industry leaders to invest in women in health care, who make up 70% of the workforce and 90% of the share of nurses, yet are “clustered into lower paid and lower status roles.” With little power to change their working environments, women are harassed and discriminated against at higher rates by both male colleagues and their patients, the authors said.

In the health care setting, working women earn an average of 28% less than overall, and represent only about 25% of the industry’s leadership, according to new research released by Women in Global Health. At the same time, sexual harassment is considered a “major problem for women health and social care workers, but rarely recorded or sanctioned,” according to the group, who found that just 37% of countries have an official protocol when it comes to preventing and reporting attacks on health care workers.

The fact that women play such an outsized role in medicine and care work has also put women at a particularly high probability of contracting the coronavirus. As of January, 1.2 million health care workers were infected with COVID-19, their research shows.

“Health systems and health security will be stronger when the women who deliver health and care have an equal say in the design of national health plans, policies and systems,” the group urged.

Dhatt also added that women are fed up with the status quo: “The world cannot expect women to go back to business and inequality as usual post-pandemic.”