There is no shortage of women working in healthcare, but women remain underrepresented among the industry's senior leaders.

Despite significant improvement in recent years, this persistent gender imbalance serves as evidence that much more work needs to be done, says Annette Walker, MHA,president of City of Hope Orange County.

"I think in our industry there's been a tremendous amount of progress made in executives' awareness of women and the potential of women, and you can see that there's considerably more women in the C-suite than there were even five years ago," Walker says.

"There, unfortunately, has not been the same progress in the CEO seat," she adds.

Women fill about 63% of entry-level healthcare jobs, but their representation shrinks at levels of increasing responsibility, as is the case in other industries, according to a reportreleased last week by McKinsey & Company as part of its ongoing Women in the Workplace research.

Women fill half of all the senior manager or director-level healthcare jobs and just 30% of healthcare C-suite posts, according to the report, which studied payers, providers, pharmaceutical companies, and biotechnology firms.

[Read the full story on the HealthLeaders website.]