International Women's Day 2024
, by Ophira Ginsburg, M.D., M.Sc. and Elise Garton, M.Sc.
International Women’s Day is celebrated annually on March 8 to recognize the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity. The Center for Global Health supports this call to action in many ways, including through its partnership with the Lancet Commission on Women, Power, and Cancer, initiated and co-chaired by CGH Senior Advisor Dr. Ophira Ginsburg.
The Lancet Commission on Women, Power, and Cancer was formed to address urgent questions at the intersection of social inequality, cancer risk and outcomes, and the status of women in society. Women interact with cancer in complex ways: as healthy individuals participating in cancer prevention, as patients, as health professionals, researchers, policymakers, and as unpaid caregivers. In all these domains, women often are subject to overlapping forms of discrimination, due to age, race, ethnicity and socio-economic status, that render them structurally marginalized. The Commission published its first report in The Lancet in September 2023, which included ten recommendations for international organizations, national and subnational governments, researchers and funders, civil society, and the private sector to make cancer research and care, responsive to the needs and aspirations of women in all their diversities.
When we first proposed this commission in 2019, we wanted to ensure it embodied our own values by adopting a truly intersectional, feminist approach to the work. We sought to disrupt power dynamics, promote transformative action towards gender equality and social justice, center women’s bodies, reflect the plurality of women’s experiences, integrate an anti-racist and decolonial approach, challenge the way cancer research is funded and conducted, and shift the culture of cancer away from individual blame by recognizing the role of structural, social, and commercial determinants of health on cancer risks and outcomes in women. This required a strong, interdisciplinary team that could conduct the research with humility and inclusiveness, and we were proud to assemble a commission of 17 women and 4 men based in 14 countries, as well as 10 mentees, a 7-person international patient advisory committee, and 13 advisors.
The first in-person meeting of The Lancet Commission on women, power, and cancer in Istanbul, Turkey in March 2023.
We worked virtually on the report for almost three years before convening in-person for the first time in Istanbul in March 2023. The global launch of the report in September 2023 at the Geneva Graduate Institute and many follow-up dissemination opportunities, such as the African regional launch at the AORTIC conference, London Global Cancer Week, and the Malaysia national launch, have provided opportunities for the team to meet and celebrate our achievements in person.
Since September, the Commission members have been interviewed for news articles, recorded podcasts and radio interviews, written blogs, and presented at workshops and seminars about their work on the Commission in over twenty countries. Our expertise and passion for the work is evident in all these engagements and it has been exciting to see so many commissioners share our findings and urgent recommendations to achieve better cancer outcomes for women across the globe. The reaction to the Commission’s findings has been striking – the report has been mentioned and covered by many high-profile news outlets around the world and has attracted remarkable bibliometric attention relative to other scientific papers.
Our work, and the fight for gender equality in cancer research, care, and outcomes, does not end with publication of the report. In addition to the continued work of the members of the Commission in their existing roles as cancer providers, researchers, policymakers, and educators, we are planning to monitor and evaluate the implementation of the ten recommendations posed in the report that will lead to lasting and impactful change. Along with partners, we have identified key performance indicators, data sources, and baseline data to measure the implementation of those recommendations globally. We plan to share these indicators and supporting data this summer and inspire others in the oncology community to contribute to this research and improve gender equality in their own contexts and worldwide. We invite you to follow along as we share more about our monitoring and evaluation plan and additional dissemination events in the coming months.
CGH is pleased to continue supporting this work as part of its strategic goals to support innovative and impactful research and promote NCI’s engagement with key partners in global cancer research and control. The commission has had remarkable achievements over the past year, and we are confident that we’ll show even more progress towards equality for women in cancer care and research at next year’s International Women’s Day!