Our session is looking at the progress after one year since we published our main report of the Lancet Commission on Women, Power and Cancer. Actually, I have to say, we had a lot of wonderful support from UICC and we had a global launch event last year around this time here in Geneva.

I’m very excited about our session on gender, power and cancer which is the first in many opportunities, I hope, to take our recommendations, based on our research findings of the commission’s work, forward, to make them actionable in the real world. Now, that sounds like rhetoric but we actually have a plan to do this. Number one, of course, is through dissemination activities with colleagues that are here at the World Cancer Congress and elsewhere. This includes having people speak to the importance of the commission’s work for their own work, even if they were not involved with the commission. A case in point, we have Dr Ani Shakarishvili who is a senior advisor at UNAIDS who is our keynote speaker tomorrow. She will address some of the issues around her work on behalf of UNAIDS for women and girls, particularly those who are structurally marginalised. The commission is often thought of as dealing primarily with women, of course that’s correct, but we really want to emphasise the importance of this work to advance equity for all women in all our diversities. That means women of colour, women living in migrant and refugee situations, women who are ethnic minorities in their own countries and on and on. Women disadvantaged and disenfranchised. That is really what we mean when we talk about this as being an intersectional feminist framework for cancer.

In what ways are the challenges to equitable gender-transformative cancer care and prevention being overcome in LMICs?

In the commission’s work we did a deep dive into the literature, the existing literature, on the many ways in which women have barriers that they face even in seeking care, to learn about prevention, to understand what the risks of cancer are in the first place, then their opportunities to act on those risks and, once they do reach the cancer health system, if they are diagnosed with cancer, the challenges and of course the opportunities and potential solutions to overcome those challenges in completing their care. There is a multitude of things that women face that are different than what the average man faces and that’s regardless of country. For example, women are still primarily the providers of care for their own family members, including children but also elderly parents.

So the work of the commission addressed that component, the unpaid caregiving workforce, which is primarily performed by women in every country. What would it be like if we could estimate the value of that unpaid caregiving, for example? That’s just one dataset that came out of the work of the commission. Using this as an example, because that’s a concrete thing that countries can do, we did a proof of concept in a few instances, including what a gendered investment case for cancer would look like using a non-sex-specific cancer, colorectal cancer, very common in women as well as men, in the country of Peru for which we had enough data to work through what an investment case would look like if you compared that between men and women.

Likewise, with the unpaid caregiving, this is information that others can now take forward to do those estimates and to determine how best a given country may see this as an investment in the overall health and wellbeing of its citizens. If you paid people paid family leave etc. or were able to pay people for the work that they do in the home looking after their own families so they can get back into the paid care workforce, for example. There are many such examples that we give.

We’re also working on a set of indicators, that sounds boring and dry but it’s not. These are metrics for which there is benchmarking data, some which we generated in the research that is the commission’s work, some which already existed but had not been reported in a systematic way using gender and intersectional elements.

So our overarching recommendation that sex and gender needs to be considered in all aspects of cancer research, practice and policy making, that’s really what we’re getting at. We’re soon going to show some indicators that people can use, different stakeholders including multilateral organisations, researchers and research funders, civil society and the private sector, as well as, of course, hospitals, universities etc. to take these individual opportunities into their own workspaces and their own policies.

Are there any other future plans?

I’m very excited to get almost on a weekly basis requests or information sharing via email or text or sometimes I see a notification that the Lancet Commission was mentioned in either a news story or in the grey literature or the regular published literature of people actually taking the findings and/or the recommendations into their own work. There’s an opportunity, for example, one of my colleagues, co-Chair Dr Isabelle Soerjomataram who is the Deputy Head of Cancer Surveillance at IARC, the WHO’s international agency for research on cancer, she spoke in a parliamentary session last year after the report was published during Gender Equality Week as part of the European Parliament’s Health SANT committee. That was very exciting for us and we hope to see more actions in the policy sphere to drive things forward. Who knows, maybe one day we’ll see a resolution, either in individual parliaments or at the World Health Assembly that can address some of these really urgent topics that, by the way, are not only concerning cancer. The topic of patriarchal systems that influence girls’ and women’s health and wellbeing is one that’s been long overlooked and we hope that our work can be also used by people in other domains beyond cancer.

Are there any organisations pushing towards guidelines that could be implemented on an international level?

There’s a lot more going on in the background and it’s not for me to say what other organisations are doing. But I would suggest that people stay tuned, keep your eyes open, look at our website, The Women and Cancer Commission website, or at the US NCI Centre for Global Health where we have a page under partnerships and dissemination dedicated to the Lancet Commission on Women, Power and Cancer for updates.