The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) is gathering for its annual global meeting in Chicago this week, and the topic of gender equality is on the agenda.

HIMSS bills itself as the most influential health IT event, with more than 40,000 attendees. But although 75% of entry-level healthcare workers are female, that number drops to 32% at the C-suite level, according to a McKinsey study; women also have higher attrition rates and are less likely to be promoted. And globally, the World Economic Forum calculates that, at the current rate of progress, it will take more than 132 years to achieve full gender parity.

“When you put it like that, it sounds really daunting,” says Grace Perez, the chief digital program officer at GE HealthCare, who is helping to organize a full day of programming to promote women in health IT. Women are essential to GE HealthCare’s success. “The patients, providers, clinicians, IT professionals, and service engineers interfacing with our products include women,” Perez explains. Women at GE HealthCare “are representative of our customers. When we innovate, they can relate to what our customers’ needs are.”

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A woman or transgender or nonbinary person in the room, Perez continues, can raise questions about the way tools are designed so that they work with the bodies of people of all genders, not just men, which has historically been the default. Women have been instrumental in developing better breast cancer imaging tools as well as devising better methods for placing an intratracheal tube so it won’t pierce the esophagus in different-size adult bodies.

“It’s not just equity for the sake of equity,” says Perez. “It’s equity for the sake of being the best we can be and bring out the best in everyone.”

GE HealthCare designed its HIMSS programming in partnership with the Female Quotient, a company that works with businesses to close the gender gap in the workplace and is best known for creating spaces for women to gather at major conferences, including Davos and SXSW. HIMSS is its first foray into the healthcare field.

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On Wednesday, the GE HealthCare booth at HIMSS will transform into the Equality Lounge, with a daylong slate of programming, including talks, panel discussions moderated by the Female Quotient’s CEO, Shelley Zalis, and live recorded sessions of HIT Like a Girl, a podcast about women in health IT hosted by Joy Rios. “We want to show that women are a big piece of the industry and that we’re sometimes overlooked,” says Perez. “It’s hard to overlook a gaggle tour de force of up to 50 women walking the floor at a predominantly male-attended tech conference.”

Several women from GE HealthCare will be participating, including Karley Yoder, the GM and chief digital officer of ultrasound; Vaishali Kamat, GM of new ventures in ultrasound digital solutions; Gamira Mathur, director of project management; and Margarete Martinez, product owner of ViewPoint ultrasound. In addition, GE HealthCare CEO Peter Arduini will participate in a panel on how to be a good ally. The day will include an opportunity for all genders to participate as equity champions.

One of the reasons GE HealthCare decided to partner with the Female Quotient is its vast social media reach: All the talks and panels will be live-streamed to approximately 1 million followers across multiple platforms. “They’re a force to be reckoned with in the equality space,” says Perez. “Their vision is to bring equality to lift everyone. It was an easy choice to make.”

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But Perez also liked the Female Quotient’s style, which she describes as “Hey, let’s come together and talk about this.” So, in addition to the more formal talks and the panels, there will be comfortable chairs and couches where people can sit together and chat over a cup of coffee (also available in the booth, served in cups with sleeves printed with equality-promoting slogans). The idea is to bring people to the booth who might not have interacted normally and get them talking about new ways for women to navigate a very male-dominated industry and also about new business collaborations. The Equality Lounge will be handing out ribbons for visitors to attach to their badges so that, on other days of the convention and in other places around the hall, they can identify one another as people who care about equity and continue the conversation.

“We plant the seeds and then people realize how important it is and it takes off,” Perez continues. “Equity for women in the work environment has driven some of our best innovations.”

Up next, GE HealthCare will be sponsoring the Women in Tech Global Conference, May 9–12, to continue the conversations on equality and equity for women, focusing on career growth.

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