Global health has a largely female workforce and a largely male cadre of leaders. Despite recent progress in achieving gender parity among board chairs of nonprofit organizations, a troubling trend persists: Female CEOs in global health continue to earn substantially less than their male counterparts, with the pay gap widening over time.
This growing inequity in compensation, coupled with the concentration of men in leadership roles at larger organizations, underscores the urgent need for systemic change in how the sector approaches gender equality at its highest levels.
This is not a new topic to Devex, and calls for improving gender balance are not new: A 1997 World Health Assembly resolution sought gender parity by 2002. The World Health Organization had major gaps in women in leadership until Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus introduced a balanced leadership team in 2017.
About the authors
Traci L. Baird
Traci L. Baird is the president and CEO of EngenderHealth, where she works closely with the organization’s talented global leaders to establish strategy and implement programs in the areas of sexual and reproductive health and rights, or SRHR, maternal health, and gender. Traci has worked in the field of global SRHR for more than 25 years. A focus of her leadership is organizational effectiveness and ensuring that EngenderHealth “walks the talk” of gender equality and authentic partnership.
Kent Buse
Kent Buse is a professor at Monash University Malaysia, in Kuala Lumpur. He is a political economist who has published widely on global health governance and health policy analysis. He is co-founder and co-CEO of Global 50/50. He was head of strategy at UNAIDS for over a decade and taught at Yale University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
