“We need women not fully on the frontlines but additionally in leadership.”
Washington, D.C., 8 March 2021 (PAHO)—Marking International Women’s Day, Director of the Pan American Health Group (PAHO) Carissa F. Etienne this present day said that women are “on the frontlines” of the fight against COVID-19 but underrepresented in world and national health leadership. She called for building leadership with the “beefy involvement of women” during and after the pandemic.
“Women make up the huge majority of health care workers,” Dr. Etienne said during a digital International Women’s Day convention hosted by PAHO. “They head households and are the main services for many of these households – unprecedented of here’s unpaid work and in the informal labor workforce. Indeed women are at the very coronary heart of the response, yet women remain disproportionately underrepresented in national and world health leadership, whether in health institutions or other policy-making bodies.”
She added, “By no map has health leadership occupied the world stage with such urgency and never has the need been greater for that leadership to be inclusive and representative of all those affected in very distinct ways, including, of course, women.”
The Monday convention included Alejandra Mora Mora, Govt Secretary of the OAS Inter-American Commission on Women (CIM), Julio Frenk, President of Miami College and former Minister of Health for Mexico, and Claudia Lopez Hernandez, Mayor of Bogota, Columbia.
Mora Mora pointed out that women’s leadership will possess to peaceable be known. “The first thing that must always be achieved in phrases of leadership is make our leadership viewed,” she said. “We’re ready to make decisions. So when we’re not being known, we have to inquire of and denounce.”
She called on governments to see the pandemic has affected women in another map, in phase by increasing the domestic violence against them as they exhaust more time at dwelling with their partners. “We have to name on states to determine on the lens of gender,” she said. “We can’t continue believing that we’re all equal – that differentiated impacts attain not exist.”
Panelists also pointed out that women possess shouldered the burden of trying to take down jobs whereas caring for kids at dwelling because of this of of public health measures. The “care economy,” in which women consume care of kids and other kin at dwelling for no pay, will possess to peaceable be compensated, they asserted.
In her remarks, Dr. Etienne drew consideration to the breadth of the contributions that female scientific examiners possess made as COVID-19 has swept all the map thru the Americas, infecting virtually 50 million individuals and killing more than million.
She pointed out that the Inter-American task force on Women’s Leadership experiences that in Latin The US and the Caribbean, nine out of ten nurses are women whereas fully 25 p.c of govt positions in hospitals are held by women. All over the Americas, 1,000,000 scientific examiners possess been infected by COVID-19. Four thousand possess died, and two out of three of them are women.
“The pandemic is unprecedented from over, and we need women not fully on the frontlines but in leadership,” Dr. Etienne said, asserting that rebuilding after COVID-19 offers a rare opportunity to “obtain more precise societies” with women in leadership.
“We bustle countries to construct insurance policies not for women but by women,” she said. “It’s miles estimated that fully 1 p.c of world leaders are women and that fully 14 p.c of Parliamentarians are women all the map thru the world. I am distinct we are capable of attain better than that. Here’s another opportunity for a paradigm shift to the holistic, sustainable pattern which we yearn for. Sustainable pattern will not be imaginable if women are excluded from leadership.
Contacts
Daniel Epstein
Nancy Nusser
Sebastián Oliel
mediateam@paho.org
Source:
PAHO Director calls for more women in leadership of the fight against COVID-19
