Women at the top: lack of diversity is a serious patient care issue

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According to the General Pharmaceutical Council's (GPhC) register data as of March 31, 2025, 62.8% of registered pharmacists and 85.3% of pharmacy technicians in Great Britain identify as female.

Yet research cited by NHS England’s Inclusive Pharmacy Practice programme (IPP) shows that only 36% of senior pharmacy leaders are women. Moreover, women represent only 2% of pharmacy business owners, whereas 13% of male pharmacists own their own business.

This is not a pipeline problem – it is a structural failure and one with consequences that extend far beyond pharmacy itself.

Evidence is stark

The leadership gap is not unique to pharmacy. The Women’s Budget Group found that while women make up three-quarters of the NHS workforce, they account for just 27% of surgeons, and 6% of health and community service directors.

Senior roles remain male-dominated at precisely the level where decisions about research priorities, funding allocation and service design are made. This matters, because who sits at the leadership table determines which patients get seen, which conditions get funded, and which communities get left behind.

When women are absent from those rooms, entire patient populations lose their most natural advocates. The evidence is stark: only 2% of UK medical research funding is directed towards pregnancy, childbirth and female reproductive health, despite one in three women experiencing a reproductive or gynaecological health issue.

Research published in Nature confirms that conditions disproportionately affecting women, including endometriosis, chronic fatigue syndrome and autoimmune disorders, are consistently underfunded relative to the burden they place on the female population.

A government survey informing England’s first Women’s Health Strategy found that 84% of respondents reported instances where they or a woman they cared about felt ignored or dismissed by a healthcare professional.

Financial fallout

The economic consequences are staggering. The NHS Confederation’s 2024 report, Women’s Health Economics: Investing in the 51 Per Cent, found that absenteeism caused by untreated conditions including endometriosis, fibroids and severe menstrual pain costs the UK economy nearly £11bn annually.

Menopause-related symptoms alone result in an estimated economic loss of £1.5 billion per year from women leaving the workforce.

Yet for every additional £1 invested in obstetrics and gynaecology services per woman in England, the return to the economy is estimated at £11. Neglecting women’s health is not just a moral failure; it is a fiscally indefensible one.

Children’s health faces the same risk when care-giving perspectives are absent from leadership. Women carry disproportionate responsibility for children’s healthcare decisions and bring lived insight into paediatric needs, medication adherence and the emotional complexity of childhood illness.

A 2024-25 Pharmaceutical Journal analysis found that two-thirds of NHS trusts lack high-grade women’s health leadership posts, and one in four has no specialist women’s health pharmacist at all. These gaps in leadership translate directly into gaps in patient care.

Social and ethnic inequality

Meanwhile, health inequalities across England continue to widen. The King’s Fund has documented that people in the most deprived areas are twice as likely to die prematurely from cardiovascular disease as those in the least deprived.

The Women’s Budget Group highlights that Black women are 2.8 times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth than White women, and Asian women 1.6 times more likely.

Gynaecology waiting times have surged by 109% since 2020. The health gender gap is demonstrably larger in areas of greater ethnic diversity, precisely the communities where women’s leadership – and the advocacy it brings – is most urgently needed.

The case for change is not only ethical; it is evidential. McKinsey’s Diversity Matters Even More report, drawing on data from over 1,000 companies across 23 countries, found that those in the top quartile for gender diversity in executive teams were 39% more likely to outperform financially than those in the bottom quartile, a figure that has grown with every iteration of its research since 2015.

Proven benefits

A systematic review published in eClinicalMedicine found that advancing women in healthcare leadership improved both organisational performance and patient equity outcomes. Diverse leadership does not just reflect our communities – it serves them better.

This is what the Female Pharmacy Leaders Network exists to address. Not because women are inherently better leaders, but because the skills forged through care-giving, advocacy and navigating complex systems of human need are precisely the competencies healthcare requires right now.

The capacity to notice who is not in the room, to advocate for those without power, to hold clinical rigour and human compassion together: these are not peripheral skills. They are the ones our health system needs most.

With nearly two-thirds of pharmacists and over 85% of pharmacy technicians on the register identifying as female – yet only 36% of senior leadership positions reflecting that reality – pharmacy has both the talent and the obligation to close this gap. The question is not whether we can afford to act. It is whether we can afford not to.