WOMEN’S HEALTH AT WORK
which have come to represent multimillion-pound industries. A growing number of private medical practices seek to ‘fill the gaps’ in public healthcare, due to women’s health issues remaining chronically underfunded across many countries. There are also innovations in ‘femtech’ (eg period-tracking apps) and digital healthcare that seek to better support women at scale in lieu of more traditional avenues, which tend to be seriously under-resourced and oversubscribed. It is vital, therefore, that business schools provide an awareness of how such sectors operate in order to foster more gender and age-based equality in the labour market; in fact, this is an interdisciplinary challenge that will involve many of our own graduates. Why business schools have a vital role to play Business schools have an essential role to play in educating students from all walks of life – and across all subject areas – in the precarious balance between profit and social advocacy when it comes to women’s health. Schools have valuable insights they can showcase in terms of how the performative impacts of ingrained institutional practices shape business and occupational priorities and behaviours. In addition, as incubators for the future healthcare workforce, contributing across other degree programmes to discuss the economic and organisational dynamics around women’s health and work is vital. For example, GPs are central to workforce participation and yet few of them view themselves as key stakeholders whose decisions have an impact on the economy, or consider how organisations often turn to them for an indication of whether an individual is fit to work in some capacity. We also know that in some jurisdictions, there may even be institutional disincentives for medical practitioners to become menopause specialists where they have to pay for their own upskilling, while there are other systematic inhibitors about how menopause is categorised within healthcare. For example, in the [UK’s] NHS system, there is no specific Quality and Outcomes Framework business rule in the case of menopausal care, as there is for other conditions such as diabetes or mental health. Given the complexity of different occupations, organisations and workplaces, there is no universal blueprint for best practice menopause support at work. However, a common theme in those workplaces where there is a more inclusive attitude is the way they recognise the power of a strengths-based approach, focusing on what their employees can do at a particular moment in time. Translating this into cultures, systems and practices that move beyond a compulsory binary of ‘work-or-no-work’ helps to prevent such negative behaviours as absenteeism, presenteeism and rapid staff turnover caused by the effect of the menopause. It also helps to recognise that everyone is likely to benefit from a more open conversation about working as we grow older and help to alter the prevailing mindset about women’s changing bodies.
BIOGRAPHY
Kathleen Riach is professor of organisation studies at Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow. Her expertise centres around gender and age inequality with a focus on how people negotiate growing up and getting older at work. She is the UK delegate for the G20 engagement group for gender equality, the W20, and serves as chair convenor for the forthcoming ISO guidelines on Menopause, Menstruation and Menstrual Health at Work
Ambition | NOVEMBER 2024 | 25
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