A leading female health campaigner says the male-dominated leadership of global medical services has compromised women's health during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Roopa Dhatt, executive director of Women in Global Health, and a U.S.-based doctor, told a World Health Organization briefing it was an "insult" to the "women who comprise 70 percent of the health and care workforce" to be forced to wear personal protective equipment (PPE) designed for men.
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Dhatt, who has worked as a front-line doctor during the crisis, told CGTN Europe the burden of unpaid work in the health sector had fallen disproportionately on women – the "shock absorbers" of the pandemic. She also insisted that lockdown policies made by men had inadvertently reversed gender equality in numerous ways, such as limiting education for girls in poorer countries and putting victims of domestic abuse at increased risk.
Her comments echoed a recent report in The Lancet medical journal, which said COVID-19 has had a "devastating" effect on women and girls.
She told CGTN via video-link: "Seventy to 80 percent of female health workers are saying that the PPE is not fitting their bodies, especially when it comes to respiratory masks not being designed in the right size, especially for their faces.
"We also know for women who are of shorter stature, a lot of the gowns that are being made are oversized and dragging, while a lot of gloves – especially in the early months – were not appropriately sized for women."
Most PPE worn by female health workers is designed for men. /Getty Images
Dhatt said the issue is by no means limited to healthcare systems in developing countries. "In the U.S. the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) gave its first round of guidelines on respiratory masks, containing a graphic showing the way to appropriately wear a mask depending on the different types of facial hair you have. There was nothing to guide women."
The result is that female health workers have been more exposed to infection, she believes.
Female campaigners are angry that detailed reports of the issue of ill-fitting PPE were ignored before the pandemic. A 2016 survey conducted by UK trade unions found that 29 percent of female respondents used PPE designed for women, and 57 percent said this hampered their work.
A 2017 report in Occupational Health (At Work) concluded: "Women often do not have access to correctly fitting PPE, they face difficulties in raising this as an issue with employers and often encounter derogatory comments from male colleagues about their poor-fitting PPE."
In recent comments in the Anaesthesia journal, Mary Ann Turner of London's Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and Monash University's Stuart Marshall, said the "failure to adequately protect a large sector of the workforce [is] ethically unsound, a health and safety issue, and a looming potential class-action lawsuit."
Some 70% of health workers across the world are women, but only 25% find themselves in decision-making roles. /Michal Cizek/AFP
This week, Dhatt told a bi-weekly World Health Organization briefing the issue comes from the gender imbalance of health sector leadership roles. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had earlier told delegates women accounted for only 25 percent of decision-making roles.
"When we take a look at the COVID-19 national task teams, 85 percent of members were men," said Dhatt. "When a body is making decisions about access to PPE supply chain issues, it's coming from perspective of just one gender.
"This really has impact. These COVID-19 task teams do not often include nurses and midwives and community health workers, and so their expertise is being left off the table. We're not going to break this a pattern until we have decision makers that represent the people that are providing care."
At the WHO forum, Ghebreyesus agreed with Dhatt's assertions that the pandemic has disproportionately affected women, who face challenges ranging from rising violence to higher levels of unemployment.
Dhatt also said the estimated gender pay gap in the health sector of 28 percent was an underestimate, citing "the $3 trillion women annually contribute to health in the form of unpaid work," which she said had been "exposed loud and clear by this pandemic."
Video editor: Steve Chappell