Women in Healthcare and Life Sciences: The Ongoing Stress of COVID-19
Women in Healthcare and Life Sciences: The Ongoing Stress of COVID-19
How Women in Healthcare are Managing with the Covid Challenges
Check out McKinsey & Company’s article:
Women have long found a path toward advancement in healthcare and life sciences—from Virginia Apgar, who developed a standard in the 1950s to assess newborn health, to Tu Youyou, who earned the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2015 for her discovery of a treatment for malaria. Women have been awarded Nobel Prizes 59 times: 18 in peace, 16 in literature, 12 in physiology or medicine, seven in chemistry, four in physics, and two in economic sciences.
Women currently account for more than half of all entry-level employees in the sector and have made progress in advancing to management, according to our previous analysis of women in healthcare.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic has created a seismic shift in the workforce, with a specific impact on women. Millions of Americans have resigned
from their jobs, and many have cited unmanageable workloads or a need to care for family as important factors in their decision. The healthcare sector is no exception. Our most recent analysis
is based on the seventh annual Women in the Workplace data (for 2021), by McKinsey and LeanIn.Org. That research looks at drop-offs in female representation, promotion rates, and external hiring at the highest levels in healthcare; at the barriers to advancement for women of color;
and at threats to recent gains (see sidebar, “About the research”). In many cases, these outcomes are correlated with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including reports of increased responsibilities at home and higher levels of burnout.
Employees surveyed were asked to identify the frequency of burnout (a combination of emotional and physical fatigue, compounded by a sense of a lack of accomplishment or fulfillment in one’s healthcare role), as well as how often they felt exhaustion, job negativity, stress, and impact on work efficacy because they were juggling responsibilities.
Parents in particular struggle
with both of these problems. For example, our analysis shows that women in healthcare are twice as likely as men to cite parenthood and increased home responsibilities as reasons for missing out on opportunities for promotion.
In previous work, we have discussed how COVID-19 could reshape the broader healthcare workforce and the potential impact of that shift on women. In this article, we start with the good news: in 2021, women in healthcare had higher representation at the managerial level and lower rates of attrition than they did in previous years. We also focus on the looming challenge of retention and on the risk that women of color will miss out on advancement opportunities. Finally, we offer strategies for improving retention and representation, as well as a goal to prepare for the shift to the next normal in an era of endemic COVID-19.
Women in healthcare are twice as likely as men to cite parenthood and increased home responsibilities as reasons for missing out on opportunities for promotion.
Reasons to celebrate
As a whole, healthcare continues to outperform other sectors in the representation of women, who make up more than two-thirds of entry-level employees in healthcare organizations. We identified three important shifts in 2021: increased representation of women at specific managerial levels, lower rates of attrition among women in healthcare than in other sectors, and increased external hiring of women at specific levels of the pipeline.
Increased Representation
In healthcare, the representation of women at the senior-manager or director level improved by four percentage points on average, to 53 percent, in 2021. That is 18 percentage points higher than the average across all sectors. The gap in female representation in healthcare between managers and senior managers or directors was smaller than it had been in 2019.
Lower Rates of Attrition
On average, in 2021 women left jobs in healthcare at lower rates than women in other sectors, men in healthcare, and women in healthcare in previous years. In particular, the female attrition rate at the C-suite level was approximately half of what it was in 2019. While many factors probably contributed to this outcome, our employee sentiment survey indicates two possible reasons: more women than men reported being somewhat or very happy with their companies, and more women than men would recommend their companies as great places to work. In addition, fewer women of color in healthcare management roles had left by the beginning of 2021 than had in 2019.
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