5 Ways Your Facility Can Support Women in Healthcare

Women in healthcare industry roles face many unique barriers when it comes to progressing in their careers. Although they make up nearly 80% of all healthcare workers, it’s not uncommon for women to face gender-related bias, discrimination, and pay gaps similar to that faced by their peers in other sectors. When left unaddressed, these barriers can cause talented professionals to leave the industry altogether — straining a system that’s already severely impacted by short-staffing.

Understanding how to support women in the workplace is critical to organizational success. We’ll explore ways your facility can create a more equitable workplace for women, which will help improve staff retention and patient outcomes.

The Importance of Supporting Women in Healthcare

While efforts are being made to include more men in the nursing profession, it’s essential for healthcare organizations to consider how to support the women in their midst. Although men make up a much smaller portion of the nursing profession, male nurses tend to earn higher salaries than their female counterparts. A quick glance at the healthcare workforce statistics alone is reason enough to support professional women in healthcare — percentages show that they’re the primary group responsible for providing many critical health services.

Another reason to champion women working in healthcare? Better outcomes for patients. In fact, studies show that increasing the proportion of female physicians can decrease maternal and infant mortality and improve treatments for cardiac patients.

How to Support Women in the Workplace: 5 Best Practices

Here are a few key ways you can support women in your facility or residence:

1. Support Women in Healthcare Leadership

Although healthcare has strong female representation across all entry-level roles, there’s a disproportionate number of men in leadership. The number of women in the industry decreases significantly the further you go up the corporate ladder — only about 15% of health system and health insurance company CEOs are women in the U.S. There are plenty of women who work directly with patients, but that’s not always the case for management-level positions.

What you can do: Take measures to ensure staff are being promoted based on objective performance and merit instead of biases and assumptions. External hiring can help reduce favoritism that may be more likely to sway internal hiring decisions. This has been shown to improve the proportion of women leaders in healthcare across the board.

You could also create a committee to ensure issues unique to women remain a priority in your facility. The committee could host general discussions exploring this phenomenon and its impact on your staff, and brainstorm how management can address this issue.

2. Accommodate the Societal Pressures That Worsen Provider Burnout

Surveys indicate that women in heterosexual partnerships are typically responsible for most household and child-rearing tasks, even when they work full-time positions. After busy days at their jobs, women often don’t have the luxury of relaxing. They continue working in a different capacity.

Healthcare is an industry that’s already emotionally and physically taxing, often requiring long hours and demanding schedules. When coupled with these societal pressures, women can have a difficult time achieving healthy work-life integration. This causes women in healthcare to experience significantly higher levels of stress and burnout than their male counterparts — also leading to poor job satisfaction and increased attrition over time.

What you can do: Focus on implementing equitable parental leave and family care benefits. Your facility could offer perks such as discounts or stipends for daycare, housekeeping, and grocery delivery services. You could start support groups for mothers in healthcare. If you manage a birthing hospital, you can offer access to lactation consultants if their schedule permits extra appointments. If you manage a long-term-care facility, you could partner with your current nursing agencies to help find assistance for elderly loved ones your staff care for outside of work.

3. Enforce Pay Parity for Healthcare Roles of the Same Level

While the Equal Pay Act of 1963 prohibits sex-based wage discrimination, men in healthcare roles are consistently reported to make more than their female counterparts. Among physicians, men earn roughly 25% more than women across several specialties — and this disparity has persisted over decades. On average, male nurses also earn $6,000 more than female nurses in similar roles, with recent data showing little progress in closing this gap.

Research has shown that women face more negative perceptions when negotiating their salaries compared to men, which may be one reason why these pay gaps still persist. Women are also more likely to take more unpaid parental leave due to societal gender norms, which can also contribute to long-term wage differences.

What you can do: Provide unconscious bias training to your hiring teams, which can facilitate the unlearning of harmful stereotypes that make it harder for women to negotiate salaries. You should also implement a standardized pay structure to ensure consistency in base salaries for staff of the same level. From there, any raises or salary increases should be based on objective performance measures and qualifications.

4. Encourage Boundary Setting to Reduce Emotional Labor in Caregiving

Due to expectations set by gender roles and the resulting stereotypes, women typically do more emotional labor in their everyday lives than men. Since healthcare is already an emotionally exhausting industry, female healthcare workers often cope with a disproportionate amount of emotional labor on and off the clock.

As the largest segment of the healthcare workforce — and one consisting of nearly 90% women — nursing presents unique challenges in this regard. Nurses must deal with a range of emotional labors: being present for deaths, working with emotionally abusive patients, repeated exposure to vicarious trauma, and listening to patient fears before invasive procedures. Patients may also have the expectation that women should be more nurturing, which can lead to added pressures of what the role of women in healthcare should encompass

Female nurses may be more likely to experience emotional labor in certain instances, such as female patients choosing to share stories of sexual abuse or assault or patients engaging in emotionally abusive behaviors because they belong to cultures in which women are less respected. The weight of these experiences can add up.

What you can do: Offer workshops or educational modules about how nurses can set healthy boundaries and advocate for their own needs. Also provide access to mental health services through an employee assistance program or through your employer health plan. This could help decrease the emotional baggage weighing on the shoulders of women in healthcare.

5. Foster Strong Networks That Empower Women in Healthcare

Mentorship is consistently cited as a key driver of job satisfaction and retention across all types of healthcare roles. Given the challenges that women in the industry face, fostering female networks at your facility can help women garner support from their colleagues and feel more empowered in their roles.

For example, women physicians who are mentored by other women are reported to have increased satisfaction and success in their careers compared to those who are mentored by men. However, this isn’t necessarily due to differences in mentorship quality. Rather, being able to more closely relate to a mentor can foster a stronger relationship and more self-confidence.

What you can do: Implement tailored mentorship programs for staff who are in the early stages of their careers. These programs should be focused on pairing individuals based on their interests, similarities, and preferences. Also, consider covering staff memberships for a women’s healthcare association, such as the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses (AWHONN), which can help them expand their resources and build a stronger female network.

How Else Can Your Facility Support Women in Healthcare?

Learning how to support women in the workplace can lead to a happier and healthier staff. Continue to grow as a healthcare leader by staying up to date with other industry insights that build upon what you’ve learned from this article. Don’t miss out on the latest healthcare insights and tips from our healthcare experts.