How gender parity improves global health
Since the start of the year, we have traveled from Afghanistan and Pakistan, where health workers administering the polio vaccine are battling snowstorms to reach children who need it, to North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where officials are trying to stop one of the deadliest Ebola outbreaks in history.
Women comprise 70 percent of these and other health workers around the world. And yet a new report from Global Health 50/50, released on the eve of this year's International Women's Day (March 8), shows that men hold a disproportionate share of power in the health sector and earn a disproportionate share of pay.
Having spent part of our careers assembling a force of woman health workers who helped reduce deaths from AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in Ethiopia by half, we know about the great contributions women make to public health.