by admin | Jan 19, 2025 | Publications
McKinzie Gales, Emelie Love Yonally Phillips, Leah Zilversmit Pao, Christine Dubray, Clara Rodriguez Ribas Elizalde, Shirin Heidari, Marie-Amelie Degail, Marie Meudec, M Ruby Siddiqui, Simone E Carter.
BMJ Global Health – January 19, 2025
Understanding sex and gender differences during outbreaks is critical to delivering an effective response. Although recommendations and minimum requirements exist, the incorporation of sex-disaggregated data and gender analysis into outbreak analytics and response for informed decision-making remains infrequent. A scoping review was conducted to provide an overview of the extent of sex-disaggregated data and gender analysis in outbreak response within low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
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by admin | Jan 13, 2025 | Publications
Trenell J Mosley, Rachel A. Zajdel, Ethel Alderete, Janine A. Clayton, Shirin Heidari, Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, Karen Salt, Marie A. Bernard
The Lancet – January 13, 2025
Enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the scientific and healthcare workforces∗ promotes research innovation and equitable access to quality healthcare. Efforts to advance DEI within the global scientific and healthcare workforces have assumed a new urgency given the strain caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the aging of the global population, and the persistent shortages in the healthcare workforce, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Yet, these fields continue to struggle to promote DEI. Considering the impact of intersectionality—how multiple identities interact to create unique experiences of privilege and power—within these workforces will enhance efforts to promote DEI. This series explores the impact of intersectionality on scientific and healthcare workforce DEI and how prominent institutional and structural factors (e.g., sexism and racism), as well as their interpersonal manifestations, can create barriers for workers with multiple intersecting marginalised identities. This paper, the first in a three-part series, describes how intersecting identities interact with workplace inequities and suggests ways to incorporate intersectionality into DEI efforts within the scientific and healthcare workforces.
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by admin | Dec 9, 2024 | Publications
Gayet-Ageron A, Clair C, Schwarz J, Heidari S, Bovet E, Bize R, Stute P, Nadal D, Magnin A, Kalberer N, Michaud P-A.
Swiss Medical Weekly – December 9, 2024
Research ethics committees play a critical role in ensuring compliance with Swiss law on research involving human subjects, which prohibits discrimination and mandates the fair inclusion of participants. Recent amendments to Swiss regulations emphasise the importance of including diverse groups representative of the target population in terms of sex and age, with any exclusions requiring clear justification. Globally, representativeness and diversity in research remain challenges, despite guidelines like the SAGER guidelines, which aim to embed sex and gender considerations into research design and reporting. In response, swissethics established a working group in 2023 to develop the “SAGER-swissethics recommendations,” promoting the integration of these dimensions in Swiss health research. This paper highlights the ethical and scientific importance of addressing sex and gender in research.
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by admin | Sep 14, 2024 | Publications
Shirin Heidari
The Lancet – September 14, 2024
Despite the growing rhetoric around women’s health, the increasing recognition of gender bias in health research and data, and the seeming rallying behind gender equality, why does progress towards gender equality and equity in health remain so slow, fragmented, and fragile? This question is at the heart of Sophie Harman’s Sick of It: The Global Fight for Women’s Health.
Harman presents many real-life examples to illustrate how women’s health is exploited “as a means of attaining and sustaining power in the world”. She challenges this “sick politics” and examines “how using and abusing women’s health for political ends works and how it stops us making real strides in women’s health”. Notably, she proposes steps for driving change through solidarity politics.
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by admin | Oct 3, 2023 | Publications
Shirin Heidari, Els Torreele, Ahmet Metin Gülmezoglu, Sharifah Sekalala, Naomi Burke-Shyne, Gabrielle Landry Chappuis
The Lancet – October 03, 2023
From HIV and influenza, to Zika virus, Ebola virus disease, and most recently COVID-19, the gender implications of disease outbreaks and the detrimental effects of a lack of a gender lens in the way governments and societies respond to large-scale and contained epidemics are well documented. Pandemics create differential vulnerabilities with particular negative implications for women in all their diversities and their health, and further exacerbate long-existing, deep-rooted gender inequalities and social injustices, more severely disadvantaging women in low-income and middleincome countries, women in marginalised communities, and women who are criminalised.
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by Gendro | Sep 27, 2023 | Publications
Ophira Ginsburg, Verna Vanderpuye, Ann Marie Beddoe, Nirmala Bhoo-Pathy, Freddie Bray, Carlo Caduff, Narjust Florez, Ibtihal Fadhil, Nazik Hammad, Shirin Heidari, Ishu Kataria, Somesh Kumar, Erica Liebermann, Jenna Moodley, Miriam Mutebi, Deborah Mukherji, Rachel Nugent, Winnie K W So, Enrique Soto-Perez-de-Celis, Karla Unger-Saldaña, Gavin Allman, Jennifer Bhimani, María T Bourlon, Michelle A B Eala, Peter S Hovmand, Yek-Ching Kong, Sonia Menon, Carolyn D Taylor, Isabelle Soerjomataram
The Lancet – September 26, 2023
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, such as due to age, race, ethnicity and socio-economic status, that render them structurally marginalized. These myriad factors can restrict a woman’s rights and opportunities to avoid cancer risks, are a barrier to diagnosis and quality cancer care, maintain an unpaid caregiver workforce that is predominantly female, and hinder women’s professional advancement. The Lancet Commission on women, power and cancer was created to address urgent questions at the intersection of social inequality, cancer risk, and outcomes, and the status of women in society.
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