Abstract
The paper distils results from a review of relevant literature and two gender analyses to highlight reasons for gender imbalances in senior roles in global health and ways to address them. Organizations, leadership, violence and discrimination, research and human resource management are all gendered. Supplementary materials from gender analyses in two African health organizations demonstrate how processes such as hiring, deployment and promotion, and interpersonal relations, are not 'gender-neutral' and that gendering processes shape privilege, status and opportunity in these health organizations. Organizational gender analysis, naming stereotypes, substantive equality principles, special measures and enabling conditions to dismantle gendered disadvantage can catalyze changes to improve women's ability to play senior global health roles in gendered organizations. Political strategies and synergies with autonomous feminist movements can increase women's full and effective participation and equal opportunities. The paper also presents organizational development actions to bring about more gender egalitarian global health organizations.
Highlights
Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 5.5, which aims to ‘ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life’ [1] will depend on progress towards realizing all the targets for Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5
The findings presented have implications for the extent to which women will be able to attain the most senior representation in global health organizations without targeted and sustained change efforts
Organizational inequality generating mechanisms are driven by cultural norms that, to one extent or another, subject women to subordination, discrimination and violence in organizations
Summary
Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 5.5, which aims to ‘ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life’ [1] will depend on progress towards realizing all the targets for Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5. Improving the gender balance in senior global health roles in health research, policy, education and advocacy depends on realizing other SDG 5 targets (see Table 1). It reviews factors that constrain women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for ‘leadership at all levels of decision-making’ in research, policy, education and advocacy in health organizations. Many of these factors have already been documented in research or scholarship addressing barriers to women’s leadership and workforce participation.
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