Female leaders in healthcare: Breaking down barriers for women's health

• Female leaders provide disruptive perspectives to complement those already represented on today’s leadership teams
• Women continue to face healthcare challenges that can create barriers to female leadership
• Policy change and new technologies could play a crucial role in breaking down existing barriers for women’s healthcare issues

The issue of gender health inequality is well documented with wide gaps in medical research and funding for female-specific conditions. A recent study showed that funding for medical research where a disease affected primarily one gender was awarded to diseases affecting males in almost 75% of cases.¹ As a consequence, there is a lack of clinical research and data on women’s health issues and a lack of understanding of how conditions present differently for women.

Given that women are reported to make up 39% of global employment, these disparities present a huge challenge for a substantial percentage of the workforce.² Healthcare Transformers spoke to Bettina Zimmerman, General Manager of Roche Pharma Peru and President of the Health Committee in the NGO WomenCEO, about some of the issues women face on a day-to-day basis, how these can create barriers to women leaders in healthcare, and what can be done to break down these barriers.

HT: Why do you think women’s health is an important consideration in terms of female leadership? 

Bettina Zimmermann: Women’s health is important from a company perspective, and from a societal perspective, because we need to have female leaders at the decision table. In order to bring our voices to decision tables and help overcome any challenges we face, we need to make sure we stay healthy and well. It’s like in an airplane – when the oxygen mask comes down, they tell you, to put it on first before you look after others. It’s the same in leadership. If we don’t look after ourselves, we cannot look for others.

HT: Could you describe the kinds of health challenges that women have to deal with on a daily basis?

Bettina Zimmermann: There are several challenges that women face when it comes to healthcare.

Deprioritizing health

A major challenge is the fact that women aren’t able to prioritize their health. For example, according to INEI 2019, 60% of women in Peru deprioritize their health because they have to look after their children and their husbands, and they have to manage the household.³ On a global scale, we see a similar picture.⁴ One of the first things we need to do is to help women to prioritize their own health.

Problems overlooked

A second challenge is around the level of care that women receive when it comes to the most deadly diseases – cardiovascular disease and cancer. Symptoms can present themselves differently in women, several times, healthcare professionals are not trained to look for female-specific symptoms.⁵ All too often women with serious heart conditions are dismissed as being anxious or stressed. They are prescribed time off work and their symptoms are not properly investigated.

Cultural factors

Cultural factors are also a challenge for women and their health. We see this here in Latin America. Stigmas can prevent women from getting screening for diseases like cervical cancer and breast cancer so when the disease is found it is at a much more advanced stage than it might have been.

Healthcare system design

The other issue I see is that healthcare systems are not designed for women. This is despite the fact it’s women who are often using the healthcare system the most because it generally falls on us to take care of sick relatives. Our systems are just not efficient in terms of the way care is received. It’s not unheard of for women to have to go to ten different clinics or hospitals before they get the care they need. No one has time for this.

HT: How can we as leaders, not just female leaders, help women to prioritize their health? 

Bettina Zimmermann: Data shows that women take on 75% of the unpaid work at home, so we often don’t have time to prioritize our own health.⁶ To change this, women must be able to discuss the matter at home and delegate certain responsibilities, which is not easy. A lot of this depends on the broader cultural context. 

We also need to see systemic change. One of the ways this could happen is by making sure we have a much better understanding of the value women are delivering. One country that is trying to address this is Spain. The Spanish government has launched an app that they are using to collect data to better understand men’s and women’s contributions to unpaid work at home. Based on this data, policymakers will be able to put policies in place that will help to support women’s role in society.⁷

HT: Can you provide an example of where you see healthcare barriers being broken down?

Bettina Zimmermann: In the public health system, approximately 75% of cancer cases are diagnosed at an advanced stage.⁸ This contrasts with the private health system, where only about 20% of cases are diagnosed at an advanced stage.⁸ Among these cases, 65% are diagnosed in women.⁸ The supply of health services for cancer care in Peru is centralized in the capital, Lima,⁸ which means most women have to travel there to receive care. For some, this would be like traveling from Switzerland to Madrid for treatment. 

Peru is trying to address this barrier through a new cancer law that is aimed at decentralizing cancer care and strengthening the capacities of regional oncology services and offices to reach more women.⁹ In addition, aware of the public health problem for women, the cancer law has prioritized the diagnosis and attention of cervical and breast cancer, which should be implemented next.⁹

HT: Could technology as well as policy change play a role in overcoming barriers?

Bettina Zimmermann: Technology has a big part to play in helping to eliminate barriers to care. Let’s take pre-screening, for example. If there is a technology that is simple to use then a person of trust in the community – like a community health worker or social agent or some leading women of the community – could do that screening and identify women at a higher risk of developing cancer. Besides mobilizing the women to do their prevention, they will also help to focus the limited healthcare capacity on high-risk women.

Today, many people of a relevant age have a mammograph, but we lack trained professionals to interpret images. Artificial intelligence (AI) can also help e.g. to overcome the lack of trained professionals to read mammograms. This new technology can look at these images and say, ‘They look okay, radiologists don’t waste your time with that’, or ‘This looks suspicious, please have a look at that’. So it helps us use existing human resources in a more efficient way.¹⁰

For maternal health, where women don’t have the opportunity to have an ultrasound or regular checkups, there are portable devices that can be taken into the community. They run with very little battery, and they save images so they can be downloaded when they’re back in a Wi-Fi network where they have better connections.¹¹ All these types of technologies help eliminate healthcare barriers in the community.

HT: Why is it so important to break down these barriers and have female leaders at the table?

Bettina Zimmermann: We need more women at the table where decisions are being taken on topics that impact women and society in general. For example, ‘How do we design a healthcare system more efficiently’ or ‘What diseases should we investigate’, because 50% of the population is female ¹² and we are still facing challenges in healthcare.

While we keep on pushing to make those wider changes those of us who are in leadership positions, particularly those of us working in healthcare, can push for progress from within. We can directly influence our people to encourage them to prioritize their health and take preventative measures to stay well so that we might see them at the decision table in the future. From an overall leadership perspective, I think it’s important that we keep breaking down these barriers. Studies have found that unless we have at least 30% female representation, there will be no significant benefits of having more senior female leaders.¹³ We need more women at the decision-making table to make sure our voices are heard.