Continuous Work Support Checklist for Female Healthcare Workers: Scale Development and Validation

Healthcare jobs are very popular among women, however in Japan, women readily quit working because of gender-role responsibilities. This study aimed to develop a workplace support checklist for women to continue to work. In 2017, we investigated 780 (female 74.8%) faculty members and healthcare professionals of one medical university in Japan. We asked them to score the extent to which they considered 35 items identified by a task team, to be related to continuous work support for female workers in healthcare. We carried out an exploratory factor analysis and extracted four domains with 16 items in all: "Support for child rearing and home care" (five items), "Information dissemination" (five items), "Active promotion of women workers to higher positions" (three items), and "Consulting and counseling service" (three items), with Cronbach's alpha values ranging from 0.88 to 0.92. We found that the first three factors were generally associated with reasonably relevant characteristics of being female, in their 30s, married, and members of faculty. We also found that women with "Intention to leave" the workplace underscored the importance of "Support for child rearing and home care" and "Consulting and counseling service". These results suggest that the checklist is reliable and valid.