The proportion of women holding senior leadership positions in the NHS has increased slightly over the past year, with an additional 206 women now sitting on clinical commissioning group governing bodies and provider boards.

Exclusive analysis by HSJ found that 39 per cent of executive and non-executive positions were held by women, compared with 37 per cent at the same time last year.

NHS acute, mental health and community providers saw a 30 per cent increase in the number of female finance directors, a 7 per cent increase in female medical directors and an 9 per cent increase in female trust chairs.

These were the roles in which women were particularly poorly represented when HSJ first conducted this analysis a year ago.

However, despite the increase, women still hold fewer than one in four of these positions and remain significantly under-represented at the top when compared to the non-medical NHS workforce overall, which is 81 per cent female.

Nicola Hartley, director of leadership development at the King’s Fund, said: “any sign of positive progress” was to be celebrated but a “more significant shift in the culture of NHS organisations” was needed if senior leadership teams were to become more diverse.

graph

She added: “Our work suggests that barriers to women taking up leadership positions remain and senior leaders continue to recruit in their own image.

“Women working in the health service continue to tell me about the resistance to requests for flexible working and the dominance of ‘macho’ working styles in their organisations.”

Both CCG governing bodies and provider boards have seen an overall increase in the number of board level positions, of 4.7 per cent and 2.2 per cent respectively.

However, this has been outstripped by the rate of growth in the number of women employed at this level, at about 8.5 per cent for both types of organisation.

Karen Castille, associate director at the NHS Confederation, told HSJ the increases were “modest but encouraging”.

Following publication of HSJ’s initial research last year, Ms Castille and chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies organised a series of meetings of senior figures from health service national bodies to discuss how to get more women into senior positions.

Ms Castille said: “I think the next step is for local health and social care communities to get a sense of it for themselves.

“If every chair and chief executive in the NHS said we want recruitment companies to find a field that’s mixed, that would be a great step forward.”

Topics