95 - Evaluating Women's Leadership in Global Health: Assessing Organizational Change through Individual Stories

Abstract Information: Women comprise 70% of the global health workforce while only occupying 25% of leadership positions and 5% of CEO or head of agency positions. To address this gender disparity, WomenLift Health was established in 2019 to expand the power and influence of women in global public health by working at both individual and organizational levels. To inform their work, WomenLift Health has partnered with local research organizations in India, Nigeria, East Africa, North America and Europe. The aim of this locally led learning is to investigate and evaluate the stories of working in and leading global and public health organizations within different cultural contexts. In this poster, local partners including LEAD at Krea University (India), Nextier (Nigeria), and Bixal (US/Canada/Europe) will highlight the powerful stories from leaders and executives in some of the most influential global health institutions around the challenges women face on their path to leadership, the power of male allyship in the workforce, and traits of effective leaders. The stories highlight how individual experiences feed into organizational perspectives on inclusive leadership over time, and how these organizations can advance gender parity in health sector leadership. Lastly, the poster will also share methodological approach to synthesizing and analyzing specific narratives from individuals to cull out larger-level, actionable insights for organizations and sectoral stakeholders that can help design and drive better interventions in the space of women's leadership in global public health.

Relevance Statement: Storytelling has been acknowledged as an acceptable research tool for gaining insights into issues or evaluating interventions in public health. Riding on the growing interest in storytelling as an evaluation tool, we utilized it to explore the skewed representation of women in the leadership of global health organizations. Although women constitute most of the health workforce, they occupy barely a quarter of all leadership positions, with as low as 5% of executive positions occupied by women. Women leaders in global health organizations face multiple societal, home and workplace challenges. In recent years, there have been concerted efforts to address gender disparity in health sector leadership. We conducted a study to ascertain the current issues related to women’s leadership in public health organizations. Our abstract is relevant to the field of evaluation because it utilizes a participatory evaluation approach to understand individual and organizational determinants that influence women’s leadership in public health organizations. Recognizing the value of context and local partnership for evaluation rigour, WomenLift Health partnered with leading local research institutions, such as LEAD at Krea University, Nextier and Bixal. The research institutions conducted studies in India, Nigeria, East Africa (Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda), Canada, the United States and various European countries to capture unique stories from women leaders in global health. In this multi-country and locally driven investigation, evaluators used mixed qualitative methods to uncover individual and organizational stories to generate evidence that can be leveraged to promote gender parity in public health leadership. The findings from all the countries revealed familiar stories around gender roles and highlighted contextually specific challenges peculiar to different countries. For example, a common barrier for women in Nigeria was the limited access to educational opportunities starting in primary education. In contrast, women in India highlighted their inability to travel safely for work as a challenge. Interestingly, some of the policies commonly believed to assist in elevating women, such as paid maternity leave, end up taking women out of the workplace for longer, with unintended implications for career advancement. Our session will add value to the AEA conference because it will highlight how we used participatory evaluation methods such as interviews and focus group discussions to explore the issue of gender disparity in the leadership of public health organizations. We will discuss the challenges encountered in utilizing these methods and the strategies we used to address these challenges while ensuring the quality of the overall evaluation study. Our session will also enable participants to hear unique stories from prominent female public health leaders about the challenges on their path to leadership, the power of male allyship in society and organizations, institutional changes (implemented and recommended) and leadership traits that facilitate or mitigate women’s the rise to leadership. During our session, we will also discuss the place of local partnerships and context-specific data collection methods in capturing authentic voices and stories during participatory evaluation. Lastly, we will leverage our experience to provide recommendations for the commissioning and conducting similar evaluations.