There is a plethora of interventions an employer can choose from to redress their workforce inequalities, but how do they know which will be most effective?
Despite efforts to decrease health workforce inequalities between poor and non-poor areas (see Table 5 for a summary of the main policies) major inequalities remain in all four countries.
The result, as labor economist Lawrence Katz has found, is an increasing polarization of the workforce, with inequality rising more between the top 10percentt and the middle, rather than between the middle and the poorest deciles.
Additional studies on health workforce financing inequality using the demand-side approach such as in the utilization or benefit impact analysis of HRH financing could complement this study.
Under-five deaths are more highly concentrated in areas with a relatively small share of the health workforce, and inequality in the distribution of the health workforce will therefore become more pronounced by using this measure of need, compared with the standard measure.
Moreover, few attempts have been made to analyse the implications of using alternative measures of health care needs in the measurement of health workforce distributional inequalities.
Interestingly, they also found that more women in the workforce lowers income inequality, although women still earn 15% less than men.
Moreover, superimposing concentration curves for the cadre-specific distribution provides an illuminating way to analyse the relationships between distributional inequalities in the total health workforce and skill mix inequalities.
These demographic shifts mean more opportunities will open up for women, who have previously been held back in multiple countries by everything from old-boy-networks to institutionalised workforce restrictions and even inequalities enshrined in law, Catalyst said in its report, released ahead of International Women's Day on 8 March.
