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Experts call for transformative feminist approach
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. – A new Lancet Commission report highlights how gender inequality and discrimination influence women’s rights and opportunities to avoid cancer risk factors and impede their ability to seek and obtain timely diagnosis and quality cancer care. Three experts at RTI international, a nonprofit research institute and leading international development organization, helped author the new report, Women, power, and cancer: A Lancet Commission.
Ishu Kataria, Ph.D., senior public health researcher at RTI, Rachel Nugent, Ph.D., senior technical advisor of the RTI Center for Global Noncommunicable Diseases and Gavin Allman, health policy analyst at RTI collaborated with this new Lancet Commission. The commission brings together a multidisciplinary and diverse team from around the globe 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 true burden of cancer in women has gone largely unrecognized and has far-reaching consequences for families and to society more broadly,” said Nugent. “Our commission calls for new feminist research, monitoring and action on emerging cancer risks that disproportionately affect girls and women, including occupational and environmental factors.”
Key findings in the report:
- Cancer ranks in the top three causes of premature death among women in most countries around the world.
- Of the 2.3 million women who die prematurely from cancer each year, 1.5 million deaths could be averted through primary prevention or early detection strategies, while a further 800,000 deaths could be averted if all women everywhere could access optimal cancer care.
- In many countries, regardless of geographic region or economic resources, women are more likely than men to lack the knowledge and the power to make informed cancer-related health-care decisions.
The commissioners call for strategies targeted at increasing women’s awareness of cancer risk factors and symptoms, along with increasing equitable access to early detection and diagnosis of cancer.
“Our analysis of National Cancer Control Plans (NCCPs) shows that they do not include clear and measurable targets to address issues of equity and gender that influence access to cancer health services and the individual’s experience of cancer. It is therefore important to engage partners to create strategies to provide quality cancer care for women in NCCPs and include time-bound measurable indicators of gender and related dimensions of equity,” said Kataria.
To transform the ways women interact with the cancer health system, the commission argues for sex and gender to be included in all cancer-related policies and guidelines, making them responsive to the needs of all women, whether they be patients, care providers or researchers.
"Cancer care not only fails to meet the needs of many women as patients, but also neglects to support the women who disproportionately provide unpaid caregiving services," said Allman. "To address these gaps, we must develop equitable and inclusive support systems."
Read the full report
Learn more about RTI’s center for global noncommunicable diseases
