Don’t Play To The Terms Of The Man’s World

Women leaders in healthcare speaking at the DigitALLWithBW contended that although there is a long way to go in achieving overall gender parity in India,  things for the healthcare sector still seem better than other sectors as the labour participation force is at par in the sector with men. With the women leaders also stating that they ensure that there is no pay gap in the wages of men and women in their firms and adding that things are changing in the healthcare sector but slowly. 

“Healthcare sector does see the largest number of women workforce, having said that the reports across the globe show that there is pay parity in healthcare here I would like to defer a bit and speaking in the context of India, most of our technical staff whether they are doctors, nurses, paramedics or other technical staff get the same pay and most of the corporate or private hospitals do not discriminate between men and women,” said Dr Devlina Chakravarty, MD & CEO, Artemis Hospital. Adding to that she said that the problem arises when one looks at untrained and third-party contractual employees where a lot of exploitation might take place.

Agreeing on good labour participation force in healthcare Ameera Shah, Promoter and MD, Metropolis Healthcare said “The sector is seeing enough women coming up into the workforce but the real challenge is a lot of them come into junior levels and then as they get more and more senior opportunities many of them drop out either because that's not an aspiration or or because they are unable to balance things in personal and professional lives.

Shah added that socially and from a conditioning perspective women are linked to being a good mother, a good daughter-in-law and those are very important parts of one’s identity rightfully or wrongfully and therefore they don't want to compromise on that in order to make more money and when you compare it with men it is all about maximizing the economics.

Healthcare industry leaders also said that women also have a host of abilities which are superior to men like multitasking, high emotional quotient among others which aid them in being good managers and leaders. Dr Garima Sawhney, Co-founder stated that “Women are more empathetic, flexible, emotionally intelligent and comparatively smaller egos than men and they are motivated and good problem solvers and these are the qualities which are required to run any organization or any startup.” 

In order to inculcate more women into the senior leadership the healthcare leaders stated that opportunities should be given to women in managerial positions and decision making tables as this will bring diversity of voices and ideas in organisations.

Speaking on the senior leadership roles, Shagun Sabarwal, South Asia Director, WomeLift Health said that “Only 25 per cent of women occupy senior leadership positions in healthcare globally and at c-suite positions the number drops to just five per cent and in low and middle-income countries the number is even smaller.”

She said that the country needs more women leaders because the more diversity that you have on the decision-making tables the better the decisions will be and innovative and out of the box ideas will take shape. 

Adding to that Dr Devlina said that right from medical schools both men and women should be given certain management exposure like in AIIMS it is becoming mandatory for all medical students to have a course in MBA and that helps them to do parallel thinking so they can look at issues beyond patients and women especially should be given a chance as they have this innate strength of being a natural leader because they are managing so many things at one time.

“I think we are definitely on a progressive track but I also think we have to keep fighting for equal opportunity and equal pay, we also have to keep having conversations around support but also we have to somewhere not play completely to the terms of the man's world which has been designed,” stated Shah.