UNU-IIGH is delighted to host the launch webinar of a new working paper, bringing together leading researchers and experts to explore the gendered risks of privatised practices on the health workforce, drawing on existing literature and a case study from India.
Prevailing narratives have long asserted that the restructuring of health systems, via privatisation, corporatisation, commercialisation, and financialisation, are necessary pathways to achieve universal health coverage and the Sustainable Development Goals. However, an expanding evidence base challenges this narrative. It showcases how policies and reforms promoting privatised practices in healthcare are deeply rooted within logics of extraction, commodification, and exploitation, weaking public health care and contributing instead to widening inequalities. To date, the effects of these structural shifts on the health workforce however, remain under researched, particularly from a gendered perspective.
This working paper is an initial exploration into the gendered risks of privatised practices on the health workforce. As women constitute the vast majority of health and care workers and already face systematic discrimination and undervaluation, the expansion of privatised practices in healthcare threatens to deepen structural gender inequalities by reinforcing power hierarchies, labour segmentation, informalisation, and precarisation.
This launch event will convene researchers and experts to catalyse further research, dialogue, and collective engagement on the intersections between gender, labour rights, and health systems reform. As health system policies continue to promote privatised practices, it is urgent that we strengthen discourse and evidence on their gendered impacts on the health workforce to ensure commitments to gender equality and the right to a safe and healthy working environment are upheld.
Read the full working paper via this link: https://go.unu.edu/xlUIt
