Gender equity and equality reporting for healthcare leadership and beyond: Towards a national gender equity and equality in leadership data framework

Women are underrepresented in key decision-making and leadership roles across almost all sectors in the Australian workforce, despite making up over half of the workforce. Evidence shows that more women in leadership is good for business – it delivers improvements across performance, productivity and profitability – and in healthcare it leads to improved and more equitable health care outcomes for patients and improved quality of care. While efforts have been underway for some time to improve gender equality in leadership, progress has been slow. Accelerating progress requires a focus on solutions and shifting the responsibility for change from the individual to collective systems and organisational action. Recent extensive reviews of the evidence have identified what organisational interventions work and how organisational practices and conditions work together across sectors to advance women in leadership. Research suggests that evidence-based, organisational approaches and equity processes are needed to address gender inequality and organisations must adopt a systems approach to implementing, measuring and evaluating the impact of their interventions.

The aim of this paper is to identify what is currently being measured and reported in gender equity and equality to understand how this aligns with the evidence for what works to advance women in leadership broadly, and then with a focus on the healthcare sector. This information can then be used to inform improvements in what data are collected – to support widespread efforts to drive change and sustainable impact for gender equity in leadership.