Retaining Female Leaders in Healthcare

Source: Kat McDavitt, CEO of Zorya Foundation/ Used with permission

This post is part of my subseries on how organizations can transform leadership development for women, as described through the eyes of women’s lived experiences and where gaps remain.

Kat McDavitt is the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Zorya Foundation and its award-winning Mothers in Medicine fund, both focusing on bridging the professional success gap for women in healthcare and other industries. She is also the founder and president of Innsena, a growth consultancy for healthcare sector companies.

Gender-related challenges exist in all industries

Many people assume that women who work in female-dominated industries experience fewer gender-related challenges to leadership inequities than those in male-dominated industries. But that isn’t necessarily the case.

McDavitt's experience highlights that even in female-dominated sectors, women encounter difficulties related to maternity leave, childcare affordability, and cultural biases based on how companies are built within societies that reinforce certain cultural norms. As Kat recalls when she worked in a predominately female industry:

I remember when I had a child, half of my take-home salary went to childcare. I really enjoyed working and I did have access to high-quality childcare and I was fortunate to have a supportive partner, so we could afford those things. But I looked around and there were many people working hard who did not have that kind of setup. So those women dropped out of the workforce as a result.

She recognized more women drop out of the workforce due to the affordability and availability of childcare.

I read a recent LinkedIn survey of 3,000 respondents indicating that nearly half of women drop out after having children and half cited affordability of childcare as a reason that they don't stay in the workforce. Now, these typically aren't women in high leadership positions yet—typically, this happens early or mid-career. But it's hard to come back into the workforce and suddenly become a C-suite leader, after that. You're unfortunately behind because as we move up the ladder, even in very women-dominated industries, there are still more men in the top leadership roles and those men typically didn't drop out for their children.

The loss of talented women in their early and mid-career stages could have long-term repercussions for their advancement into leadership positions.

On top of that, she learned that the women in leadership were making sometimes half of the salary of their male peers, despite the work and impact they were making and the publicly acknowledged pay-gap disparities.

When McDavitt moved to a more male-dominated tech company as the only woman on the leadership team, the gap widened and the inequities and maternal bias were even more palpable.

In this company, which was a good, mission-driven organization, there was actually a cultural expectation that women wouldn't come back to work after having a child. [The company was located] in an area of the country where women largely stayed home with their children. And so culturally it is not expected that they come to work. So, they also didn't get promoted. And [in this company, more women were in client-facing service roles] where the message was that you could easily be replaced by someone else. There wasn't a lot of focus on retention. The moment that woman became pregnant, they prepared for her to leave. That was it.

The gender pay gap was also present in this environment, but there were even greater gaps in the lack of policies and structures to accommodate or make new mothers comfortable coming back to work. For example, she recalled,

I fought to get a dedicated lactation room. Before that, the designated lactation room was also the CEO's personal conference room. But women weren't comfortable asking the CEO to leave his conference room so they could pump—even though he always immediately left the room whenever needed. The company did change and implement new policies to support mothers. As another example, later another woman joined the leadership team and together we implemented a more generous maternal leave policy. It took women in leadership willing to speak up to make these things happen.

Later, McDavitt was fortunate to work with and then consult with a Canadian-based company, which had a strong DEI program and supportive parental leave policies. It revealed to her the significant differences in benefits and policies that prioritize women's retention in the workforce. She learned that there are ways to create policies that support all employees and still successfully run a company. Strong parental leave policies and support for childcare made a huge difference in workforce retention.

As a result of these experiences, McDavitt started her foundation. She initially focused efforts on supporting healthcare workers because of the increasing gap in childcare needs and coverage she saw during the pandemic.

There were news stories of nurses leaving their children for months because they didn't want to get them sick. And we heard about childcare centers shutting down. So our goal since then has been to keep women in the workforce by helping them with childcare and education needs. In particular, 70 percent of the healthcare workforce are women: nurses, CNAs, respiratory therapists, phlebotomists, etc. These women are not well compensated, and many of them are single mothers who may be supporting multiple children. Many of these women do not have choice about whether to stay in the paid workforce or work as a stay-at-home parent.

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How can organizations better meet the needs of women (and all parents) in leadership in order to retain them?

Throughout her experiences, McDavitt identified five areas organizations can do better:

1. Supporting women through this period of their lives is worth it. It helps with retention and increasing a diverse workforce. It increases loyalty to companies who support you during this stressful time. It costs less than the cost of constantly recruiting and retraining new people.
2. Normalize post-pregnancy needs, such as lactation rooms and pumping and storing milk. She recalls, “I remember watching one of our executive leaders cleaning her pump machine parts in the kitchen in front of everybody, just like it was not a big deal—just very normal. And there was always breast milk in the fridge. That was really meaningful for me to see as a first-time mom.”
3. Don’t rest on your laurels. Gender-related challenges exist in all industries, including women-dominated industries.
4. Learn from examples of comprehensive support systems for women. Draw inspiration from countries and other companies that have progressive, successful policies.
5. Put effort into the retention of all talented people. This includes learning how to demonstrate value to them and care about their needs and making the effort to understand what those are. It then also includes designing policies and structures that meet the needs of women, especially in regard to childcare and work-life balance.

This post is part of my subseries on how organizations can transform leadership development for women, as described through the eyes of women’s lived experiences and where gaps remain. Each of the posts from these subseries are pulled together from interviews. Direct quotes are notated in italics and offset for readability. There was no conflict of interest to disclose with this interview. The author of this post did not receive any financial benefit or compensation from conducting or writing this interview.