I do want to preface that I'm not a biomedical researcher or a clinical care researcher; I'm a social scientist. We bring a different perspective, perhaps, from some of the other witnesses who have spoken today and in some of the other sessions that I watched online.
My perspective is that on gender itself, one of the big contributions of social sciences to the health care research field is disentangling gender from a socio-cultural angle versus that biomedical or clinical angle. Absolutely, we know there are health conditions that are exclusive to biological women, and we know that others are understudied in women. That's often rooted in the power dynamics associated with gender. That dynamic then extends across the field from undervaluing research to undervaluing women as scientists, to undervaluing social science perspectives of how we can improve health care and access to health care services across the genders.
I'm speaking also as somebody coming from a more rural-dominated province—half of our population is rural. These barriers are all intertwined with the ongoing health care crisis, and yet the conversation around women being the majority of health care providers is itself absent from many of our discussions on improving access to health care for all Canadians.
I would suggest that if we are looking to improve access to health care, that means reducing the barriers to women accessing health care occupations. It also means reducing barriers to men entering into predominantly female health care occupations themselves, unconsciously or consciously.