Women and Global Health Leadership : Power and Transformation

Women represent the majority of people working to improve health outcomes in communities, non-governmental and multilateral organizations, both as paid and unpaid health and social care workers. So why is it that when it comes to leadership positions, we have a governance system that privileges men and what can we do to redress the imbalance? This ground-breaking collection explores the leadership roles that women hold in global health, teasing out the routes women have taken to leadership, the challenges they have faced, and what has facilitated their journey. It brings to the fore the stories of women on the frontlines of this struggle from around the world, highlighting and complementing these stories with theoretical and analytical explorations of the structures and systems that help or hinder the process. Among the topics explored:

• Gendered Institutions in Global Health
• Gender, Peace, and Health: Promoting Human Security with Women’s Leadership
• Academic Journal Publishing: A Pathway to Global Health Leadership
• Women in Health Systems Leadership: Demystifying the Labyrinth
• Women’s Leadership in Global Health: Evolution Will Not Bring Equality

The book is a rallying call to arms to redress gender inequality and celebrate the many ways in which women are taking the lead in supporting the health of their communities internationally.  

Women and Global Health Leadership is a must-read for those working in or studying global health. It is also a primer that aims to support other women in their efforts and struggles to succeed in a highly unfair and unequal world. The book will engage ministers of health, policy-makers, practitioners, academicians, students, researchers, healthcare workers, health service managers, and members of multilateral organizations. By highlighting key barriers and facilitators to women in global health leadership, organizations can use this book to help inform the development of institutional policies and procedures to support women in leadership positions across academic, health workforce, and global health governance systems. It also can be used within postgraduate courses focusing on the global heath workforce, leadership and management, and women’s studies. 

Rosemary Morgan, PhD is an Associate Scientist within the Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. She is an expert in gender, gender analysis, and intersectionality in health and health systems research. She works on a number of global and public health projects as a primary investigator or gender advisor, including: the Sex and Gender Analysis Core for the NIH-funded Sex and Age Differences in Immunity to Influenza (SADII) Center; the Gender and COVID-19 Project, Risk and Resilience in the Health Workforce: Understanding and Supporting the Experiences of Women Health Workers during COVID-19, Rapid Mortality Mobile Phone Surveys during COVID-19, the UK Partnerships for Health Systems programme (UKPHS); and Learning, Acting and Building for Rehabilitation in Health Systems Consortium (ReLAB-HS). She also coordinated the highly successful Research in Gender and Ethics (RinGs): Building StrongerHealth Systems, a project which brought together four research networks encompassing 23 institutions across 26 countries in a partnership to galvanize gender and ethics analysis in health systems research. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins Rosemary was a Lecturer in Global Health Policy for the Global Public Health Unit at the University of Edinburgh, and a Research and Teaching Fellow at the Nuffield Centre for International Health and Development at the University of Leeds. She holds a PhD in International Health and Development from the University of Leeds, an MSc in Policy Studies from the University of Edinburgh, and a BA in Sociology from the University of British Columbia.

Kate Hawkins is a research communications expert with technical expertise in health, gender, and international development. She is the founder and director of Pamoja Communications Ltd. She has worked in international development and health for over 18 years. She began as a community volunteer delivering HIV prevention interventions to vulnerable groups in her home city of Brighton, UK. This led to paid work in the NGO sector on HIV and sexual and reproductive health internationally with a focus on advocacy. Much of her work was with vulnerable and marginalized groups such as women living with HIV and sex workers. From this she moved into global health more generally and was one of the co-founders of Action for Global Health – a pan-European network of campaigners. Later in her career Kate became interested in the role of evidence in policy and programmatic decision-making. She worked in academia and managed a ground-breaking research collaboration on sexuality in the Global South. Since founding her own company, she has managed the communications of many international research consortia working on health and health systems in low- and middle-income countries. Kate is committed to feminism, international solidarity and support, and the realization of rights.

Roopa Dhatt, MD is a practicing internist in Washington, DC, USA, trained in international health and a global health and gender advocate. Dr. Dhatt is particularly committed to addressing issues of power, privilege, and intersectionality that keep many women from global health leadership roles and to opening up spaces for the voices of these women to be heard. Dr. Dhatt is the Executive Director and co-founded Women in Global Health (WGH) in 2015.  She advises the World Health Organization (WHO) on matters of health workforce, gender equity, and universal health coverage. Dr. Dhatt was recognized in the Gender Equality Top 100, the most influential people in global policy 2019. In 2021, the Lancet featured her work on gender equality. As Co-Chair of the Gender Equity Hub in the Global Health Workforce Network of the WHO, she supported WGH in the "Delivered by Women, Led by Men" report which looked collectively for the first time at issues of leadership, decent work free from all forms of discrimination, harassment including sexual harassment, the gender pay gap, and occupational segregation―across the entire health workforce.  Dr. Dhatt has a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science from the University of California, Davis; a Master’s in Public Affairs from Sciences Po, Paris, France; and a Medical Degree from Temple University School of Medicine. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine and International Health at Case Western Reserve University. She has academic affiliations at Georgetown University and University of Miami.

Mehr Manzoor is a Fulbright Scholar and a PhD candidate at Tulane University in the Department of Health Policy and Management. Mehr is a strong advocate for gender equality, intersectionality, and women’s leadership in global health and beyond. Her research work includes gender and intersectionality analysis of global health organizations, and explores issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in workplaces. She is a co-lead author on the technical report “Delivered by Women, Led by Men: A Gender and Equity Analysis in the Global Health and Social Care Workforce”, which explores issues of decent work, organizational segregation, gender pay gap, and leadership in the global health workforce and was published by the Gender Equity Hub at the World Health Organization. She taught Social Aspects of Health to incarcerated women in Louisiana in 2020 as part of Newcomb College Institute and Tulane’s College in Prison project. She was selected as WLGH Leadership Fellow for the inaugural Women Leaders in Global Health (WLGH) conference in 2017 in Stanford, California, and in 2018 was selected as an Emerging Voice for Global Health (EV4GH) program fellow. She volunteered and served as a research director at Women in Global Health from 2016-2019. She has received Changemaker Catalyst Award by Taylor Center at Tulane University for her work on women’s leadership in global health, and her social venture on women’s leadership in low- and middle-income countries was selected in Taylor Center’s Changemaker Institute at Tulane University in 2021. She holds an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan, and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan.

Sulzhan Bali is a health specialist with the World Bank, with over a decade of research and work experience in a variety of public health contexts – including health security, emergency response financing, and disease surveillance and response programs. Sulzhan has a track record of publications in top journals, and extensive experience working on low income and fragile countries across West and Central Africa. Her work includes evaluation of global response efforts for multiple major epidemics. Prior to joining the World Bank, Sulzhan worked with the University of Maryland – University College and the Public Health Foundation of India. In the realm of global health governance, Sulzhan has participated in multi-lateral dialogues to discuss global health futures for the next decade as a Bosch Global Governance Futures Fellow. She also served as the Director of Production and HR for This Week in Global Health (TWiGH) – an online video and audio podcast on global health. For her work with TWiGH, Sulzhan was featured in the “300 Women Leaders in Global Health” campaign by The Lancet and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies Geneva. Sulzhan completed her PhD in Molecular Biology with the Medical Research Council (MRC) in the UK and holds degrees from Duke University (M.Sc., Global Health), the University of Manchester (M.Sc., Virology), and the University of Delhi (B.Sc., Microbiology).

Cheryl Overs joined a group of feminist lawyers lobbying for decriminalization and destigmatization of sex work andprotesting violence and discrimination against sex workers in 1981 in Australia. By 1984 that group evolved into a membership-based sex workers group named the Prostitutes Collective of Victoria (PCV). Cheryl led the successful campaign for law reform in Victoria and oversaw the development of innovative programmes for sex workers. In 1988 the PCV hosted the Prostitution and the AIDS Debate Conference in Melbourne which led to the formation of the national federation of sex workers' organizations, the Scarlet Alliance. In 1992 Overs met Brazilian sexuality activist Paulo Henrique Longo and they founded the International Network of Sex Worker Projects (NSWP). Cheryl was the first director of the NSWP which was based in France before hubs were established in Brazil and South Africa. Cheryl currently works in academia at Monash University where she contributed to the establishment of the Michael Kirby Centre for Public Health and Human Rights. She also works on human rights and sex work issues at Sussex University and the Institute of Development Studies where she has developed an on-line resource centre on sex work research (PLRI); published a map of sex work law and several articles about sex work and human rights in the context of public health and development aid; LGBT rights; economic empowerment and poverty reduction for marginalized women and girls; pre-exposure HIV prophylaxis; and sexual citizenship.