Health committee  From my point of view, research on the effects of intimate partner violence is underdeveloped, which also has an impact on the health system. That’s some of what I wanted to put out there. We know that 80% of health staff are women. So, we can’t talk about an epidemic for the general public without also talking about the impact of this epidemic on the health workforce.

Health committee  I do want to preface that I'm not a biomedical researcher or a clinical care researcher; I'm a social scientist. We bring a different perspective, perhaps, from some of the other witnesses who have spoken today and in some of the other sessions that I watched online. My perspective is that on gender itself, one of the big contributions of social sciences to the health care research field is disentangling gender from a socio-cultural angle versus that biomedical or clinical angle.

Health committee  Understanding how the dynamic works in rural areas is completely under-researched and without any type of dedicated funding structure to look at this.

Health committee  Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to give you a few more details on the subject. It’s a conceptual framework developed by the World Health Organization and it helps put a bit more emphasis on these four dimensions. First, there is segregation, which I talked about earlier.

Health committee  Okay. I would suggest then that pay gaps, leadership, gender occupational segregation and safe environments for women in the health workforce are critical to improving the health workforce, yet research is lacking.

Health committee  Thank you very much. My name is Dr. Neeru Gupta. I'm a professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick. I'm also the equity lead with the Canadian Health Workforce Network. As such, I would like to share with you some of my thoughts on how we can improve women's health research, and in particular I would ask the committee to consider that ending the neglect of women's health research necessarily entails ending the neglect of research on women in the health workforce.