LONDON –
Sara Freeman/MDedge News
Dr. Sarah Hawkes
“Gender equality is everyone’s business,” Sarah Hawkes, MBBS, PhD, a professor of global public health at University College London (England), said at the event.
“We’re not talking about women taking over the shop, but women being given an equal opportunity to run the shop. It doesn’t matter where we place ourselves on the gender spectrum as far as advancing equality in science is concerned. What matters is that we all, irrespective of gender, call ourselves feminists.”
For years, women have been “underrepresented in positions of power and leadership, undervalued, and experience discrimination and gender-based violence in scientific and health disciplines across the world,” according to an editorial in the British-based journal (Lancet. 2019;393:493). Such inequalities are compounded and hard to separate from other inequalities, including ethnicity, disability, class, geography, and sexuality.
Despite efforts to readdress the predominantly male culture of medicine, the problem of gender inequality remains “stubbornly persistent,” the editorial said.
“We have spent years being told that the problem lies with us as individuals and that we just need to be better, stronger, more vocal, as women,” Dr. Hawkes observed. “But what really needs to happen is for change to happen in places that hold power.” She further argued: “We don’t need any more individual change; we need organizational and institutional norm change.”
Gender inequality has a long history, and not just in medicine, said British journalist Caroline Criado-Perez OBE, who gave a keynote speech. Ms. Criado-Perez, who is a well-respected feminist campaigner, noted that the world was largely “modeled to fit men.” From architecture to transport, and even crash-test dummies, everything was largely modeled on, or to accommodate, the male rather than the female body.
“I don’t need to tell you that women are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack” than men. There is no more urgent need to challenge gender inequality than in medicine, Women are dying because of the gender data gap in medicine,” she asserted. “In medical research, in medical education, in medical practice, it needs to be closed as a matter of urgency.”
Original data published in the Advancing Women in Science, Medicine and Global Health special edition of The Lancet found that only 31% of biomedical research papers published in 2016 reported outcomes for both men and women (Lancet. 2019;393:550-9). Reporting of sex differences was somewhat better in clinical or public health-related research papers, at 67% and 69%, respectively. Sex-differences were more likely to be reported if a woman was one of the key authors, Cassidy R. Sugimoto, PhD, associate professor of informatics at Indiana University in Bloomington, and associates, observed in their paper.
That said, women often have to fight to be included as an author on a paper, even when they have done the majority of the work, the event participants highlighted. Women were still less likely than men to be named as the first or last author on a paper, as well as be less likely to receive research funding to enable them to do the work in the first place (Lancet. 2018;393:531-40).
“Was it really you?” was a question sometimes asked of a woman named as a lead or first author, noted Sonia Gandhi, MD, PhD, group leader of the Neurodegeneration Biology Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in Cambridge (England). Women network differently to men, Dr. Gandhi observed, and not necessarily in networks that forward careers. Women were also often questioned about their productivity, and regardless of any training on unconscious bias, women were still at a disadvantage if they took a career break to have children.