Listen to women to reform healthcare systems.

We have a decade left to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and we are nowhere near where we need to be to succeed. One crucial reason is that women remain largely excluded from decision-making processes, which leads to policies that do not provide women the support they need to prosper - or even to survive. Nowhere is this dynamic more apparent than in the health sector. Women comprise roughly 70 per cent of the global health workforce, and perform the majority of the sector's most challenging, dangerous, and labourintensive jobs. Yet they hold only 25 per cent of the health sector's senior roles, and are rarely represented adequately in policymaking. Instead, they are often expected to remain passive actors, quietly finding ways to do their jobs in difficult - even impossible - circumstances.

The reality for women health workers was reflected in a recent letter to the medical journal The Lancet from two Chinese nurses describing the conditions they and their colleagues face on the frontlines of the battle against the new coronavirus, Covid-19, at its source in Wuhan, China. It may be an extreme case (and the letter has now been retracted over claims that it was not a firsthand account), but the challenges described, from shortages of protective equipment to chronic overwork and exhaustion, are all too familiar to health workers everywhere. Such conditions make essential health-sector jobs unattractive, contributing to severe labour shortages worldwide. The World Health Organization estimates that, for all countries to achieve SDG 3 ("ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages"), an additional nine million nurses and midwives will be needed globally by the year 2030. Closing this gap is a matter of life and death. For example, midwives are often the difference between safe childbirth and newborn or maternal mortality.

Lack of accessto them - especially for vulnerable populations, such as poor rural dwellers - is a major reason why two-thirds of all maternal deaths occur in Sub-Saharan Africa. The WHO estimates that adequate midwifery care (including family planning) could prevent 83 per cent of all maternal deaths, stillbirths, and newborn deaths. Infant and maternal mortality are hardly limited to developing countries. In the United States, the maternal mortality rate...