More than 50 women placed on healthcare boards by gender equality program

Photo: Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images

"Break into the Boardroom," a program designed to promote greater representation of female healthcare executives in corporate boardrooms, has identified and trained more than 220 women healthcare leaders and helped place 56 of its alumni and program affiliates onto corporate boards across the healthcare sector, according to its creators.

Deerfield Management and Oxeon Holdings joined forces in 2016 to create the program, and the numbers thus far suggest it has been a success.

Break into the Boardroom is centered on the philosophy that boardroom diversity is more than just cosmetics or a stab at politically correctness, but rather is just good business.

WHAT'S THE IMPACT

The program strives, by design, to be practical, concrete and measurable. With this in mind, Break into the Boardroom's goal is to find qualified women, enhance their knowledge of governance fundamentals and match them over time with appropriate board roles.

Women make up only about 14% of corporate board seats at publicly held life sciences companies, according to Bedford Group/TRANSEARCH. The worse news is that progress has been less tangible in the private company arena, according to a whitepaper published by Deerfield on gender disparity among venture-backed healthcare companies. 

Of the 236 privately held companies investigated by Deerfield Institute, only 10-12% of director roles are held by women. Given the growing recognition that diverse boards perform better, Deerfield stressed that the numbers need to grow. 

The supply of talented women executives is not the problem, the group said. Connecting them to the right demand is the hard part, and that's the challenge the program was founded to solve.

"Having a diverse and balanced board is essential for any business," said Vincent Bradley, CEO of Advantia Health, a Deerfield-supported women's healthcare services company, in a statement. "This is especially true in healthcare, where women make 80% of the care decisions for their families. As the CEO of a healthcare company with dozens of Ob-Gyn practices, surrounding myself with women leaders is vital to me personally and to our business."

THE LARGER TREND

In terms of representation, healthcare fares better than other industries in the U.S., with women holding 59% of all manager positions. But 2020 research from McKinsey & Company found the percentage of women declines incrementally up the career chain.

While women account for 66% of entry-level and 59% of manager positions, respectively, they make up just 49% of senior managers, 41% of vice presidents, 34% of senior vice presidents and 30% of C-suite executives. That still outperforms non-healthcare percentages at every stage. Across all industries, women account for just 21% of C-suite leadership.

In healthcare, the sharpest decrease in the share of women occurs at the jump from manager to senior manager – a 10% drop. This pattern diverges from other industries, where the steepest decline (also 10%) happens earlier in the talent pipeline, at the first step up to manager – also known as the "broken rung" of the ladder.

The findings from McKinsey & Company may have implications for the persistent pay gap between genders. In medicine, men generally earn more than women for similar work, but data published in July in BMJ found that the income gap between genders shrinks substantially in practices with more equal gender distributions of staff physicians.

Twitter: @JELagasse
Email the writer: jeff.lagasse@himssmedia.com