BACKGROUND: Workplace violence against health care workers is a global phenomenon has serious consequences for individuals involved, and for health care systems. Though this phenomenon has been widely studied, rates of violence remain high. Many studies tend to characterize workplace violence as a problem between individuals, largely failing to examine underlying social structures, including gendered power imbalances, that put some health care workers at greater risk of violence, both from recipients of care (patients and relatives/visitors) and from other health care workers. Intersectionality provides a useful framework to understand how overlapping social identities (e.g., gender, race) contribute to experiences of workplace violence. Our goal was to undertake a comprehensive review of the evidence on how gender and race, and their intersection, influence nurses' and nursing assistants' experiences of workplace violence and to identify gaps in the evidence to guide future research. METHODS: We conducted a scoping review following the Joanna Briggs Institute method consisting of a systematic search of six databases on July 15, 2020, with updates on June 26, 2023, and September 18, 2025, for empirical, peer-reviewed studies available in English that examined workplace violence against nurses and/or nursing assistants; and that examined the concepts of gender and/or race. Two reviewers screened the studies and data were abstracted and analyzed using descriptive analysis and qualitative synthesis. RESULTS: Of the seventy-six included studies, only five looked at the intersection of gender and race, with the remaining seventy-one looking at gender or race as independent constructs. Included studies used a variety of methods and were from twenty countries, most from the Global North. The included studies came from diverse sociocultural and political contexts, and several studies highlighted how societal norms and power relations may legitimize or normalize certain types of workplace violence, influencing how violence is perceived, experienced and reported. We found a lack of definitional clarity made comparisons across studies difficult, and that political factors such as health system policies, resource constraints, and pandemic-related stressors may also influence exposure to violence. CONCLUSIONS: Workplace violence in health care is a complex issue that negatively affects nurses and nursing assistants. Our review shows that gender and race can considerably influence experiences of workplace violence, but an intersectional analysis remains underexplored. Theoretical and conceptual clarity are needed to guide future research that is sensitive to sociocultural and political contexts to guide the design of targeted policy interventions that prioritize heath care workers who are most at risk of exposure to workplace violence.
Baumann et al. (Wed,) studied this question.