IntraHealth announces a new eLearning course—Foundations of Gender Equality in the Health Workforce—produced by CapacityPlus’s HRH Global Resource Center. Since the course launched on May 15, more than 130 participants from 40 countries have enrolled.

The course exposes participants to gender-related concepts, issues, and standards including legal and policy protections to promote gender equality in the health workforce. Gender inequalities and discrimination in the workforce can impede entry into health occupations and contribute to attrition, absences from work, lower productivity, poor health, and low morale of health workers. The course is designed for health program leaders and managers who have some responsibility for workforce policy and planning, workforce development, or human resources management.

In the self-paced, open access course, participants learn about a variety of topics affecting the health workforce including: affirmative action, workplace violence and sexual harassment, discrimination against women in education and the labor force, and international treaties and standards related to gender equality.

The course asks participants to “apply this knowledge in analyzing human resources for health policy,” says Constance Newman, course author and senior team leader, gender equality and health, at IntraHealth International. “So this becomes a foundation of gender-sensitive policy analysis, and targets improved governance and leadership of the workforce.”

There are also skills-building activities, including an analysis of a case study from an assessment of health training institutions in one country. “The course asks people to look at the data so they can develop skills to recognize types of gender discrimination as they are manifest in real case data,” Newman explains.

As with all courses on the HRH Global Resource Center eLearning Platform, Foundations of Gender Equality in the Health Workforce is a low-bandwidth-friendly, free course available to anyone who wishes to learn about the topic.

Led by IntraHealth International, CapacityPlus is the USAID-funded global project that uniquely focuses on the health workforce needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.