Since the turn of the century, scholars, statisticians, and journalists have been reporting on the so-called "feminization of the healthcare workforce" - they have found that this sector is increasingly dominated by women. Whilst women can certainly perform these jobs as well as men, the feminization of healthcare is a problem. We must ask ourselves why it might be that women would find jobs so easily in an industry centered around caring for others. Why is it that women dominate health and social care when they are in the minority in the labor market at large? Women are not only taking on the majority of domestic care work, but paid care work too. Currently, every single Member State of the European Union has a majority-female healthcare workforce.

What's more, in 2019, the World Health Organization published a report entitled “Delivered by Women, Led by Men”. This report revealed that worldwide, women occupy roughly 70% of the healthcare workforce but just 25% of senior positions. The revelation wasn't new, but the report shone a light on an intensely segregated industry. Women face horizontal and vertical segregation in health and social care. The segregation is horizontal in that women massively dominate some fields over others - for example, in Sweden, a supposedly feminist utopia, women make up just 45% of hospital physicians, compared to 88% of nurses and 93% of healthcare receptionists. Meanwhile, the segregation is vertical in that women are kept out of senior positions and in lower pay brackets. 

This has a knock-on effect on the gender pay gap, which is particularly high in this sector. The International Labor Organization estimates that the gender pay gap in health care could be as high as 26% in high-income countries. As a consequence of these dynamics, when women dominate an industry, the average pay falls.

Furthermore, since this is an industry dominated by women, when crisis strikes, it's women who bear the brunt of the struggle. It's now three years since the start of the pandemic, which highlighted the important role women play in providing healthcare. One would hope that the situation might be improving. Unfortunately, although dozens of scholars have studied the causes of gender segregation in healthcare, even offering policy recommendations for governments, very little has changed.

The WHO, Women in Global Health, and, for some reason, the Government of France have launched the Gender Equal Health and Care Workforce Initiative (which they gave the catchy acronym "GEHCWI"). Although this sounds promising, as far as I can tell, its main aim is to pump out hot air. So far, all they seem to have achieved is talking more loudly about this problem and how it's so important to solve, without offering a platform to do this. That aside, there are scores of scholars writing on this topic, with tried and tested ideas on how we can reduce gender segregation in this sector. Governments have run out of excuses for not solving this.