Australian Women in Healthcare Leadership

Individual organisations play a key role in fostering an inclusive, and equitable workplace culture, that supports the career advancement of women. Working in collaboration with healthcare organisations we are mapping, co-designing and evaluating organisational approaches to gender equity.

Women in nursing face a unique set of barriers in their progression into healthcare leadership positions due in part to the profession’s feminine bias. We are working with healthcare organisations to uncover these barriers and co-design evidence based-interventions to address them.

Evidence indicates that leadership development programs are beneficial to a women’s career advancement, but are often unevaluated and financially inaccessible.

Building on existing programs, such as the Women in Leadership Program [MH3], and academic literature, we aim to define a set of core outcomes that leadership development programs should address and measure.

This project aims to define the role of medical membership organisations in the advancement of women in healthcare leadership, and then use this knowledge to design and implement evidence-based interventions to support change.

As organisations devise policies and intervention strategies to combat this inequality, it is important they recognise that women are not one homogenous group. This project aims to understand the impacts of intersecting social identities on a women’s journey to leadership in healthcare and ensure they are taken into consideration during intervention development.