National pharmacist survey confirms industry is female-dominated

The Pharmacy Workforce Center recently released its 2014 National Pharmacist Workforce Survey, which confirmed that pharmacy has become a female-dominated profession.

"I was very encouraged to see that we're now finally seeing parity when it comes to men and women in pharmacy management roles," Eden Sulzer, director of the Women in Pharmacy Initiative at Cardinal Health, shared in a blog post on the company's online thought leadership website. "However, the gender gap persists between men and women in ownership – that's where Cardinal Health's Women in Pharmacy program comes in. It's our goal to close this gap."

The greater number of women serving as pharmacists and managers provides a great opportunity for women to begin buying pharmacies from retiring pharmacists in the next decade, but Sulzer said several issues discourage women from seizing pharmacy ownership.

Among those, Sulzer wrote, were: concerns about work-life balance as many female pharmacists assume other career tracks in pharmacy will lead to more work-life balance; a perceived lack of business acumen and lack of confidence in female pharmacists since few pharmacy schools provide specialized business training; and lack of knowledge about  independent pharmacies, which are usually concentrated in rural or urban areas.