Australia's health sector is being urged to make policy changes to address a major gender imbalance in its leadership positions.
New research from Monash University has highlighted that women in healthcare are being left behind despite dominating the sector.
About 70 per cent of the global healthcare workforce are women - with 89 per cent being nurses - but they only make up 25 per cent of senior roles.
The research examined 32 studies from around the world, including high-income countries and developing ones, to identify the causes of gender inequality in the sector and find practical solutions.
Co-author Helena Teede said addressing the gender imbalance was critical given about a quarter of female Australian workers are employed in health and social services.
Having more women in leadership positions would also lead to better health outcomes for female patients by increasing education on how to treat patients from different demographics.
The cost of parenting was one of the biggest barriers for nurses, Professor Teede said, with parental duties falling disproportionately on mothers due to limited paternity leave for Australian fathers.
"What we see is women pay their HECS, do all their hard work, work for a couple of years, and then actually the critical time when they would be advancing their careers, they will often have a family," Prof Teede said.
Female nurses often worked part-time when they returned to work and this could be perceived as a lack of commitment by management, she added.
That perception was compounded by the fact nursing was already stereotyped as feminine work and taken less seriously.
"Nursing is seen as a caring profession - and that's true - but they're not necessarily perceived as professional."
Only 10 per cent of nurses are male and they often operate in specialised fields.
Prof Teede argued having more male nurses would benefit the health sector as well.
"But when men do go into nursing, they have much more rapid career advancement," she said.
Prof Teede said industries perceived as masculine like engineering and construction had put much more effort into addressing gender inequality and could serve as models for the health sector.
The research calls on the health sector to view gender imbalance as a systemic, rather than individual problem.
It identified mentoring, leadership training, career coaching and networking opportunities for female nurses as systems that hospitals and other workplaces could implement to address the issue.
Fortunately, the sector is starting to take notice.
Prof Teede said researchers had begun working with multiple health organisations to implement policy changes and she is optimistic about the results.
"What we're seeing is really great organisational policy change within those organisations, but also across them, sharing ... things that do work, things that don't," she said.
