Ann Keeling: Female healthcare workers need to be seen as “assets and not volunteers”

An episode on the Pandemic Planet podcast by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)

Katherine is joined by Ann Keeling, Senior Fellow with Women in Global Health and lead author of WGH’s new policy brief, Subsidizing Global Health: Women’s Unpaid Work in Health Systems. Neglecting to pay women appropriately for their contributions to the global health workforce is not new. In 2015, the Lancet Commission on Women and Healthestimated that women contribute $3 trillion to global health activities every year but that at least half of that labor is unpaid, with negative implications for women’s professional opportunities in the long term. Katherine and Ann discuss why women take on more underpaid or unpaid positions than men; how the stresses of the pandemic have created even greater challenges for this cadre of unpaid workers; and how making greater investments in female health workers could positively impact the quality of care they are able to provide. What happens when women in the global health workforce aren’t paid or supported appropriately? And what key indicators can be used to ensure progress is being made in making the global health workforce more gender equitable?