Women in Global Health Leadership (from Global North)

This Monday, I attended a virtual webinar on “women in global health: non-academic career” organized by JH Center of Global Health. If there’s such a thing as a “military sergeant for women in global health”, it’s Dr.Leslie Mancuso (CEO of JHPIEGO). If you need a morning mental motivational workout, listen to her talk (also highly recommend subscribing to the JH center of Global Health newsletter because this is a series of talk for women in global health and you do not need JHU affiliation). At the beginning of talk, they did a poll of all the attendees on challenges for women in global health — ‘not having mentoring opportunities’ took the first place! Here are the key takeaways from Dr.Leslie Mancuso (with special emphasis on words where she elaborated further):

(1) “True leaders build leaders around them!” 

(2) “Prepare to take a seat at the table = listen and learn more, go beyond global health, learn about economics, learn about financing”

(3) “You may be the only woman in the room and what that means is you have to KNOW YOUR SELF-WORTH, to lead the dialogue to bring to the meeting.” 

(4) “If you don’t have a seat at the table, bring your own chair — very important to MANEUVER and get to the decision-making table.”

(5) “ITS YOUR PROGRAM, not JHPIEGO’s program” (talking about country ownership). 

(6) There are nuances between mentorship and sponsorship of women leaders. Sponsorship is about introducing/re-directing to another person(woman) who knows more about the topics.

(7) “We can only move forward if women are part of the decisions.” 

Then we had a break-out session where participants gave ideas and strategies to address how challenges in leadership. Few things I suggested at this session:

1) Learn from other fields. For example, biomedical sciences have “future PI Slack group”, a peer group for postdocs/early-career scientists on job search, conferences, etc — https://futurepislack.wordpress.com. [It looks like they have already set up the SLACK account!]

2) Acknowledge and address that women are likely in their later 20s/early 30s when they go through graduate programs so a lot of life stages are happening (marrying, moving, having children, or finding partners). If institutions truly want to improve women’s leadership, they can adopt and exemplify evidence-based policy beyond what’s mandated by US policy (like for example, fully paid 6 months of maternity + paternity leave). If I have to hazard a guess, this time period is probably highly linked to future career advancement opportunities and subsequent leadership positions. 

3) Dedicate time to hear comments/concerns from younger groups and folks from different career trajectories. Primarily, those with masters or nursing or different degrees who may not be as vocal as those like me (postdoc). 

This webinar adds to the findings from a recent article on “Gender equality in global health leadership: Cross-sectional survey of global health graduates” from Dr.Kathryn Yount’s research group from Emory University (https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2019.1701057.) This study documents gender gaps in resources and opportunities among mostly MPH students using an online survey from 353 students (out of which 60 are men). What I like about this work 1) is that they brought home their expertise on women’s empowerment in LMIC to address an important issue; 2) and documented that female graduate students did more training in methods and design, spent more time “in the field”, had more leadership in student groups while male graduate students had more training in management and leadership, more recommendations for fellowships/award, more opportunities/financial support to attend a professional conference. 

The authors make several recommendations: 1) Randomised control trial (RCT) on empowerment-based training for women 2) longitudinal follow-up on women’s careers. My thoughts after reading this paper:

1) I would rather focus the RCTs on male (even female) Principle investigators (PIs), to sensitize them to the needs of women, especially BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) so it reduces the direct burden on women to empower themselves. To me, this focuses on economic and social resources, because it appears that women graduate students are already doing pretty well with human resources (skills, classes, training). But they cant nominate themselves or asked to be mentored on a grant writing.  Ties back to the first key takeaway that “true leaders build leaders around them”.

2) When are we seeing the greatest attrition to the GH leadership career? what are the inflection points where women’s careers advanced (in terms of leadership)?

3) Some other observations: considerably more Black/Latino men are represented than Black/Latino women in the survey; likely higher degree of gender and race intersectionality going on here but I know better than to suggest looking at interaction terms in logistics regression models (a blog post for another day). For now, the suggestion is to increase the sample size, especially for men in future studies. And unpack the race variable.

Hope we can create this dialogue for women leaders in the global south as well.