Our institutions are very patriarchal: Soumya WHO’s Chief Scientist says she had faced many kinds of challenges and biases during her ICMR stint

She is counted among the country’s top scientists and public health experts, but for Soumya Swaminathan, who is the Chief Scientist at the World Health Organization and the former Director-General (DG) of India’s top medical research body, the Indian Council of Medical Research, it wasn’t always easy to be heard as a young researcher, and a woman at that. She was often “talked down to” or had her ideas dismissed, Dr. Swaminathan recounted before a global audience at an event on Tuesday.

“I was lucky perhaps that during my school, college days or right through education, even when I was doing my MD, I never felt that I was treated differently as a girl or a woman. Perhaps that is very unusual. It was only after I started my career in a government research institution that I experienced the culture of a male-dominated committee room. That is when you felt you were being talked down to or made fun of almost. And then you become diffident of expressing your opinion the next time. I was in my thirties,” Dr. Swaminathan said about her time at the ICMR, where she was first a part of the Tuberculosis Research Centre in Chennai, later rose to become its Director, and finally the head of the ICMR in New Delhi.

“I was not taken seriously; I was always told what to do, and if I had ideas, they would be shot down. I think that is the way many of our institutions function. They are very patriarchal,” she said at the fourth Women Leaders in Global Health Conference, 2020, which is being organised online. The conference that was instituted in 2017 serves as a rallying point for gender equity in health.

“It is more difficult for women researchers to get their grants approved, significantly smaller portion of research grants go to women, and women also have difficulties in getting their results published if you are from developing countries in journals because of perceived biases. I have faced those kinds of challenges and biases,” Dr. Swaminathan said, adding that this is prevalent even today, where women have a tougher time defending their grant proposals because they are treated differently from male scientists.

The pandemic has brought to the fore several gaps in equal representation of women in decision-making in national and global bodies constituted to develop a response to health crises.

A study published in the British Medical Journal on October 1 and authored by Kim Robin Van Daalen, Csongor Bajnoczki and Maisoon Chowdhury, et al, analysed COVID-19 task forces and expert committees constituted by 87 countries and found that 85.2% of 115 identified COVID-19 decision-making and expert task forces had mostly men as members, while a mere 3.5% had gender parity.