Women, healthcare leadership and societal culture: a qualitative study.

J Healthc Leadersh

Department of International Health, Care and Public Health Research Institute (CAPHRI), Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands,
Subjects And Methods: Thirty-six individual in-depth interviews were conducted with health-care leaders, including both women and men (18 women and 18 men). Directed content analysis was used to identify and analyze themes against the coding scheme of the Barriers Thematic Map to women's leadership. Summative content analysis was applied to quantify the usage of themes, while qualitative meta-summative method was used to interpret and contextualize the findings.

Results: Twenty and twenty-one barriers to women's leadership were identified within the Greek and Maltese healthcare settings, respectively. Prevailing barriers included work/life balance, lack of family (spousal) support, culture, stereotypes, gender bias and lack of social support. Inter-country similarities and differences in prevalence of the identified barriers were observed.

Conclusion: The study appraised empirically the gendered barriers that women encounter in healthcare leadership through the lens of national sociocultural specificities. Findings unveiled underlying interactions among gender, leadership and countries' sociocultural contexts, which may elucidate the varying degrees of strength of norms and barriers embedded in a society's egalitarian practices. Cultural tightness has been found to be experienced by societal dividends as an alibi or barrier against sociocultural transformation. Findings informed a conceptual framework proposed to advance research in the area of women's leadership.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6469472PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.2147/JHL.S194733DOI Listing

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