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It’s been well noted that women are the primary decision makers when it comes to health and care decisions in the U.S. However, in 2018 they are still greatly underrepresented in health care leadership. Consequently, the team at Rock Health – who has become well known for its mid-year reports on the state of digital health in America – set out to get a better understanding of the ways that societal norms, alongside recent cultural events like the #MeToo movement, influenced the industry.
"The representation of women in health leadership is growing at a frustratingly glacial pace. But the #MeToo movement has catalyzed a shift this year, and we had more women than ever share their experiences with gender discrimination. Many also shared the tactics they've used to advance their own career growth while lifting other women up," said Megan Zweig, Director of Research.
Using both publicly available quantitative data and qualitative data, with surveys created in-house, Rock Health did a deep dive into the state of women in health care ranging from geographic comparisons to racial and minority intersections to age discrimination. But the common theme from the 2018 report, is that while progress has been made, across the male-dominated health world, gender discrimination is alive and well.
The 8 most noteworthy and surprising findings about women in the health industry, and discrimination in particular, include:
- Women are more pessimistic than previous years. More than half of women working in the health sector think it will take at least 25 years to achieve gender parity in the workplace. This may be partially to blame on the lack of women in leadership in recent years. Since 2015, the percentages of women executives have remained flat. In hospitals, the number is around 33%, while in Fortune 500 health companies it hovers around 22%. For female VCs and CEOs in digital health startups, the percent of women remains between 10-12%.
- Living in the Midwest is going to hurt. 12.5% of all funded digital health companies in the Northeast have a woman CEO — which sadly, is higher than any other region. In the Midwest for example, digital health companies have a woman CEO only 3% of the time. And it’s only 8% in the South.
- The fewer females in a company, the more likely women are to adopt behaviors of their male counterparts. Rock Health found a, “Strong correlation between the percentage of women employees and exhibiting male traits. This suggests that women changing their behaviors to resemble their male colleagues is not necessarily a constant, but is a function of the environment.” This would indicate that women are more comfortable expressing feminine traits when amongst other women.
- Smaller is better. Health care companies that employ 10 or fewer people are the most likely to agree that their employer supports women leaders. Interestingly, this decreases as company size goes up, until 1,000 employees. This may be a testament to culture of small organizations, and diversity programs in larger organizations. Either way, woman in smaller health organizations give much higher rankings for company support of career development. On a 1-10 scale (with 10 being the highest), women in organizations with 10 or fewer employees give their employer an 8.3 on average. As company size grows, the average score decreased to 5.98.
- Companies with a higher percentage of female executives are more highly rated by employees. For Rock Health survey respondents who work at companies with less than 10% women executives, “The average rating of company culture on a scale of 1-10 was a striking 5.5. Companies with 50% or more women executives had an average rating of 8.6.”
- Race matters. And it’s likely compounded. For example, 86% of African American women in the survey said race is “very much” a barrier to career advancement, compared to just 9% of white women. Interestingly, cultural assimilation and race were viewed as significant barriers among Asian American women who often face perception of being the “model minority.” They claimed that, “confidence, underselling of their skills, and ability to connect with senior leadership,” to be the greatest barriers by wide margins.
- Age is an issue… Across the age spectrum. According to women in their 20s, they feel judged more harshly for not having decades of experience or graduate degrees. Women in their 30s cite family obligations as greater obstacles. And women over 50, despite having a lot more confidence than their younger peers, face age discrimination worse than that of males over 50.
- Sadly, females are still not supporting one another like they should. Qualitatively, the Rock Health team said they heard at an alarming rate, women not only saying other women in their organization weren’t supportive, but that they bullied or were “intentionally derailing” other women’s progress. This supports research that suggests women believe other women are good managers, but they don’t want to work for them.
