A Global Outlook on Women, Power, and Cancer Inside Cancer Careers

In this episode of Inside Cancer Careers, we hear from Dr. Ophira Ginsburg, Senior Scientific Officer and Senior Advisor for Clinical Research in NCI’s Center for Global Health. Dr. Ginsburg discusses the published article Women, power, and cancer: a Lancet Commission, which focuses on the social determinants of health and the power dynamics that affect women's access to cancer care. She shares the commission's key findings, which highlight the high incidence of cancer in women and the potential for prevention and early detection to save lives. Dr. Ginsburg gives her thoughts on the importance of women's leadership and representation in cancer care and provides recommendations for creating a gender-equitable cancer care system. She then discusses her career path and offers advice for those interested in pursuing a career in global oncology.
 
Show Notes:
 
Ophira Ginsburg, M.D., M.Sc.
NCI Center for Global Health
Women, power, and cancer: Lancet Commission
 
Ad: NCI Cancer Data Science Training
 
World Health Organization (WHO)
WHO Cervical Cancer Elimination Initiative
WHO Guide to Cancer Early Diagnosis
NYU Department of Population Health
Royal Society of Medicine
London Global Cancer Week
African Organization of Research and Training in Cancer (AORTIC)
 
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TRANSCRIPT
Oliver Bogler
Hello and welcome to Inside Cancer Careers, a podcast from the National Cancer Institute. I'm your host, Oliver Bogler. I work at the NCI in the Center for Cancer Training. On Inside Cancer Careers, we explore all the different ways that people join the fight against disease and we hear their stories. Today, we're talking with Dr. Ophira Ginsburg, Senior Advisor for Clinical Research in NCI Center for Global Health and leader of a recent Lancet Commission on Women, Power and Cancer. Listen through to the end of the show to hear her make some interesting recommendations and where we will invite you to take your turn.
 
Dr. Ginsburg, Ophira, welcome.
 
Ophira Ginsburg
Thank you so much.
 
Oliver Bogler
So you've done a lot of things in global health, but I wanna start with one particular recent initiative that you led, which is this commission for the medical journal Lancet. And the commission was called on Women, Power and Cancer. It sounds like a lot more than simply looking at the incidence of cancer in women, for example. Why “power”?
 
Ophira Ginsburg
Yeah, it's a great question. And thanks so much for having me on the show. I guess I'll start by setting it up with a previous series we did in the Lancet. It was a three-part article, mostly reviews, with some recommendations called Health, Equity, and Women's Cancers, which I had the good fortune to lead with a 40, a compliment, 40 authors from 18 countries. We published online in 2016, in print 2017, when I was at WHO, actually, as a medical officer. Circle back to that if it's of interest. At that time we focused just on breast and cervical cancer, and we did try to dig in a little bit into the social determinants of health that we all thought were influencing, and of course there's enough evidence, there's more than enough evidence to support that we have much more to do to close this gap and reduce cancer health disparities for women at the national level and of course at the global level. Several years later we hadn't really progressed as far as we had hoped to. And I had a conversation with Richard Horton, as you know, the editor-in-chief of The Lancet in London 2019 just before the pandemic hit, and he asked me what did I think of progress. And I could say something about the emerging efforts on breast cancer, now part of the global breast cancer initiative at WHO and cervical cancer, of course, the elimination strategy that ma