Those are skills that would fit well in any C-suite. The current CEOs of Carilion Clinic, Vista Health System, and Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals of the Northwest all began their careers as nurses.

Experts believe that the increasing awareness of how an organization’s culture and purpose impact performance can help women move up the healthcare management ranks. “Healthcare is pretty abstract until you actually have your first patient to cut open; then all of sudden it becomes real and you understand that this is more than an intellectual exercise, you’re actually involving yourself in people’s lives,” says Joanne Conroy, MD, president and CEO of Dartmouth-Hitchcock and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health, the only nonprofit academic health system in New Hampshire.

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There are multiple areas that still impede women’s progress in healthcare leadership, including identifying women with high potential. However, experts say that the biggest issue is finding mentors and sponsors for those high-potential women. “Exposure to high-level executives is critical to female career advancement,” says Heidi Leeds, senior client partner with Korn Ferry and the firm’s health insurance sector leader. “Access to mentors and sponsors who can put high-potential women in front of members of the leadership team and champion them when opportunities arise is a key ingredient for any healthcare organization hoping to achieve gender parity.”

Indeed, 65% of the female CEOs Korn Ferry interviewed for Women CEOs Speak said they only realized they could become a CEO after someone told them it was actually possible. Without that sort of sponsorship, women who do show leadership potential often will get management spots in human resources, marketing, and legal departments—important divisions, but areas that are neither critical to healthcare operations nor require profit-and-loss experience.

That lack of direct mentors has made stories like Pat Wang’s more the exception than the rule. In her role with the Greater New York Hospital Association, Wang worked with the CEOs of the 300 hospitals that make up the trade association. “I developed an understanding about the sort of challenges they faced and how they dealt with them and what was meaningful to them,” she says. Yet almost none of the CEOs were women, Wang says, so her leadership model was indirect and she was not groomed or sponsored to progress eventually to the C-suite. She drew on her other experiences to gain the confidence to lead a large organization and understand the business fundamentals needed to succeed.

Earlier in her career, without much guidance, she marshaled a consortium of New York hospitals to create Healthfirst, a nonprofit insurance company, of which she later became president and CEO. Wang believes a good leader needs to find her own genuine voice to be effective, but that it would have been easier if she had had role models before her.

Mentors can help women at all levels within healthcare not only identify career opportunities but guide how to approach them. “For years, I think many women thought it was very inappropriate or uncomfortable to say that they were ambitious or that they wanted that promotion or next job,” says Forese of New York-Presbyterian. “As women become more empowered to think about their careers, we’ve got real opportunities to change things.” Forese believes that gender diversity in leadership will improve when leaders and talent both do a better job of making sure women get an equal shot when opportunities arise.

For more information, please contact Katie Bell at katie.bell@kornferry.com or Heidi Leeds at heidi.leeds@kornferry.com.