UAE is growing and growing big when it comes to healthcare industry. Be it healthcare or pharmaceutical industry, UAE has pretty tight target for 2020. By 2020 UAE’s Pharma market is expected to double its revenue, from AED 11 Billion to 21 Billion.
But when it comes to gender equality, we are still lagging behind. Few weeks ago when it was announced that Emma Walmsley would be the new CEO of GSK, a lot of talk happened online and offline, mostly because of her gender and less for her accomplishment, which is a common trend in UAE. The number of women who are in healthcare industry are working as Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics but not often it is heard that they have taken a leadership position.
Unfortunately we do not have statistics to prove our comment but we have an alternative. In the era of digital media it’s not very difficult to find data to support our comment. The total number of people who are on Facebook are 7.8 million for UAE.
So here’s some data which we have fetched from Facebook & LinkedIn
| Job Title | Women | Men | Women Percentage |
| Doctor | 800 | 1100 | 42% |
| Pharmacist | 2000 | 2400 | 45% |
| VP, Director, CXO in healthcare or Pharma Industry | 1000 | 4000 | 20% |
So this data proves our point. When it comes to positions such as doctors, pharmacists, women are there (though the percentage is a little low there as well) but when it comes to leadership position, the situation is very bad.
To bring gender equality in the healthcare industry we should encourage our women to join healthcare sector. The literacy rate for women in UAE is even higher than men, women have a literacy rate of 95.8% vs 93.1% of men. This is great but this also means somewhere between school and leadership position they are losing out.
We feel the reason lies more with the societal pressure and less organizational culture. Most organizations encourage gender diversity and take different initiatives to support that but when it comes to cook at the kitchen or when it comes to take care of the child, we still expect our women to do that job. Obviously that’s an extra responsibility they are taking which men are taking less and that might be the root cause of this.
When we talk about women empowerment, we have to understand that this starts at our homes first. Until and unless we change our patriarchal attitude, this kind of problem are less likely to change.
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