A social media campaign asking people to nominate leading women in global health is underway with 100 women nominated so far. Sharmila Devi reports.

list of leading women working in global health is being compiled by people around the world who are nominating their choices via Twitter as part of an effort to showcase female leadership.

A preliminary list of 100 women has been created and the list is now being expanded to 200 women, said Ilona Kickbusch, director of the Global Health Programme at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

She came up with the idea of listing women leaders after attending too many conferences and panels at which she was the only woman speaker. No other such list existed as far as she was aware. “I started this after one of those meetings where I was listening to men all day and I thought what can I do?” she said. “I thought I must showcase women and I sent out tweets asking others to come up with names. Very quickly people were getting messages of congratulations for making it on to the list and others were saying how proud they were to be on it.”

Her first tweets asking for nominations were sent in November and so far the list, which is alphabetical and is not a ranking, includes women from all around the world and straddles academia, social activism, and health care. She was heartened to see the list did not just include what she called the usual or well known names, such as Margaret Chan, Director-General of WHO, or Melinda Gates of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Further nominations under the Twitter hashtag #wgh200 are being sought this month as awareness of the campaign spreads around the world, said Kickbusch. The only criteria is that the women are “working at the forefront of global health all around the world”.

Kickbusch, who has some 3700 Twitter followers, said she had refrained from nominating large numbers of women and she preferred that people stuck to nominating up to three or four women who were not already listed.

Many of the women on the list were nominated multiple times although only the initial nominator is noted. Around 60 people had sent nominations so far but she hoped the final number would be much higher. The women are ordered on the list alphabetically by surname with affiliations taken from Twitter profiles or third-party sources.

Kickbusch said she accepted that Twitter might not be the most all-encompassing source. But she hoped the campaign would act like “throwing a stone into water” and be a starting point for women in specific fields, working in other languages, or living in other regions such as Africa or Latin America to compile their own lists. “There just isn't enough visibility for many women. There is significant leadership out there but it isn't reflected at conferences or meetings”, she said. The list would help to end the excuse of conference and panel organisers that they did not know of any women leaders in global health.

She has urged male colleagues not to attend panels if there are no women speakers. But she accepts that sometimes this is not practical.

Public policy discussions were too often a reflection of current power structures in which men dominated the higher echelons of medicine and diplomacy. The list will help to showcase women who could contribute if allowed access to global discussion forums, she said.

Devi Sridhar, a senior lecturer in global public health at the University of Edinburgh Centre for Population Health Sciences, said she was surprised and pleased to be nominated. She acknowledged that using Twitter to compile such a list might exclude some, particularly those front-line health professionals working at local and national levels in certain regions of the world. But this bias was no worse than that found among the select few on the global conference circuit, she said. “There's a danger with any community that it mainly only talks to itself”, she said. “I nominated several people but I confined myself to those who are active on Twitter and whom I follow as a means to stay abreast of developments in global health.”

Michael Eriksen is founding dean of the School of Public Health at Georgia State University, GA, USA, and he nominated Judith Mackay, a senior WHO policy adviser and well known anti-tobacco advocate. They have been coauthors of the Tobacco Atlas series, which surveys the industry, since 2002.

He said despite the fact that WHO had been led by women for most of the 21st century, men still dominated leadership positions, particularly in the context of the World Health Assembly. “Highlighting the contribution of women in advancing global health helps to balance the picture and reinforces the universality of the cause”, he said. “Since most health decisions globally are made by women, it's particularly important to highlight their contribution and to showcase women as role models and exemplars.”

Ilona Kickbush Copyright © 2015 Fotostudio Feldmann