Women, Power, and Cancer: A Lancet Commission
The new report, Women, power, and cancer: A Lancet Commission, brings together a multidisciplinary and diverse team from around the globe, including scholars with expertise in gender studies, human rights, law, economics, social sciences, cancer epidemiology, prevention, and treatment, as well as patient advocates, to analyze how women around the world experience cancer, and to provide recommendations to policy makers, governments, civil society, and health and social care systems. The report presents key findings and proposes a set of recommendations to inspire real-world action for transformational change. Read the executive summary, Commentary by Dr. Monica M. Bertagnolli, a profile of Dr. Ophira Ginsburg, and the full report on the The Lancet report website.
About the Commission:
Women, power, and cancer: A Lancet Commission applies an intersectional feminist approach to investigate, expose, and challenge the current imbalance of power in relation to cancer. The report calls for sex and gender to be included in all cancer-related policies and guidelines, making them responsive to the needs and aspirations of all women, whether they be cancer patients, care providers, researchers, or advocates.
The Commission was created to investigate the nexus of women, power, and cancer. As such, it's collective work looks beyond “women’s cancers” and the biomedical aspects of any type of cancer that women- in all their diversities - might experience. It is inclusive of the ways in which sex and gender influence exposures to cancer risk factors, interactions with the cancer health system, and specific challenges faced by healthcare professionals, advocates, and caregivers. In all these domains, women can experience gender bias and overlapping forms of discrimination, such as those due to age, race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, and gender identity, that render them structurally marginalized. By applying an intersectional feminist approach, the Commission investigates, exposes, and challenges the prevailing asymmetries of power in relation to cancer in three key domains: decision-making, knowledge, and economics.