Pharmacy Daily | Female focus key to pharmacy success

COMMUNITY pharmacy needs to embrace women working within the profession, Pharmacy Guild of Australia, Executive Director, Suzanne Greenwood, believes.

Delivering the Judy Liauw Address at the Guild's Pharmacy Connect conference on Sat, Greenwood (pictured) called on men in pharmacy to support women looking to get into the profession's ownership ranks.

"Men need to be the champions of change for us in this space," Greenwood said, noting "there are more women studying pharmacy than men.

"The workforce in community pharmacy is highly feminised, and the majority of people who are coming into community pharmacies are women.

"So, put simply the success of your pharmacy depends on your ability to to tap into this, and as a network I would submit that more work needs to be done to support women into pharmacy ownership in particular.

"That's probably a rabbit hole too big and too dark to jump down today... but certainly while I've been at Pharmacy Connect and talking to the students, their minds are already jumping forward to 'how do I eventually get into pharmacy ownership?'"

Greenwood added the profession needed to support women to become role models and mentors for the next generation of female pharmacy owners.

"You can't be what you can't see," she said.

"I know that sounds like an odd comment, but for women in business we actually don't have that many role models to look up to and in many respects therefore it is the men that are in those leadership roles that we need them to champion us and be supportive.

"Otherwise we can't see what it looks like.

"We can't see what female leadership looks like and we don't have the support of the men to get there.

"So we really need to identify female role models and mentors within community pharmacy.

"We need to support them to share their stories. We need to encourage that mentorship amongst female pharmacy owners to those that are coming through the ranks."