Thank you very much.
My name is Dr. Neeru Gupta. I'm a professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick. I'm also the equity lead with the Canadian Health Workforce Network. As such, I would like to share with you some of my thoughts on how we can improve women's health research, and in particular I would ask the committee to consider that ending the neglect of women's health research necessarily entails ending the neglect of research on women in the health workforce.
We know there is no health care without a health care workforce, and we also know that we're experiencing a health workforce crisis. Indeed, this very standing committee published a report in 2023 addressing the health workforce crisis, and yet, like much health research, that report was gender-blind. In other words, there was no mention of women, and there was no mention of any potential unintended consequences of gender-blind or one-size-fits-all policies to recruit and retain health care workers.
We know that half of the Canadian population is women, and we also know that four out of five health care workers are women, so how health research considers or neglects the health of women in the workforce as both recipients and providers of care itself is an impediment to improving health care that works for all Canadians.
The Standing Committee on Health has also heard, to my understanding, from various speakers before about a number of persistent research limitations in terms of better understanding the health of women, in particular in relation to health conditions that are specific to biological females, including ovarian cancer or menopause; those health conditions with risk factors, symptoms or modifiers that more often go under-recognized in women, such as heart disease; or those that might disproportionately affect women because of a multitude of socio-cultural factors such as depression or intimate partner violence.
All of these issues, therefore, also affect four out of five health care providers, and a double impact is the neglect of research on women in the health care workforce itself.
While health care services and health research are often considered insufficiently responsive to women's specific health needs, they are also highly dependent on women as providers of care. However, gender-based analyses of the impacts on women are much less prevalent in research and funding of research on the health workforce and the associated implications for health care improvement, including improving patient experiences, the health of populations, value for money and health care provider experiences.
That last item I mentioned is implicit in the quadruple aim, which has been adopted by health care organizations across Canada and around the world, and yet women's experiences as health care providers are understudied and undervalued.
Research is scarce on how factors salient to women drive health workforce outcomes. We know that in Canada, and around much of the world, data to support research and policy on the health workforce tend to be siloed and incomplete. The Standing Committee on Health has already endorsed the need for better, more robust and comprehensive health workforce data to help address the health workforce crisis. This includes the sharing and use of comprehensive workforce data as part of a world-class health data system as identified in the Standing Committee on Health's previous report.
The recent establishment of Health Workforce Canada offers a valuable opportunity to strengthen collaborative work on health workforce data and planning. Optimizing women's contributions and research on women's contributions to the health sector must be central in these conversations.
I would ask the federal government what role we can play to help improve Canada's health care system through improving gender equality. I would argue that prioritizing research investments on women in the health sector is essential to making health care work better for women and for all Canadians.
Closing the gap on women's health research includes scaling up research on women in the health workforce. In particular, to borrow a framework from the World Health Organization, I would suggest that there are four main areas where we can work together to help improve women's research, research on women's health and research on women in the health workforce.
The first is gender occupational segregation. We know that four out of five health care workers are women. Integrating gender science into health workforce research, therefore, is imperative to disentangling occupational segregation, which is the unequal distribution of women and men within particular job types.
If our goal is to increase the numbers of practising health care providers in Canada to help address the health workforce crisis, then we must be driven through research that helps to disentangle and understand gender norms and stereotypes, so that we can—