Professor Fran Baum should have been attending the first meeting of the Lancet Commission on Gender and Global Health in Berlin this October. The COVID-19 pandemic has meant that in lieu of travelling to Berlin Fran has participated in a half day zoom meeting instead. The Commission is co-chaired by Professor Pascale Allotey (Director of the United Nations International Institute for Global Health, Mr. Elhadj As Sy (Chair of the Kofi Annan Foundation and former Secretary General of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies) and Professor Sarah Hawkes, Director of the Centre for Gender and Global health, University College London.

The full membership of the Commission is listed here https://www.thelancet.com/cms/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31547-6/attachment/b7ddce70-c5cc-42b8-b69e-6ae40138eabd/mmc1.pdf.

The Commission starts with the aim of wanting to achieve equity on the basis of gender and recognises that the gender-health relationship is complicated and multidimensional.  The Commission will be unpicking this complexity and identifying solutions for gender-responsive change within systems and different sectors (see https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)31547-6/fulltext).

Professor Baum said “I am delighted to be a Commissioner in The Lancet Gender and Global Health Commission. Gender is a social construction, influencing, and influenced by, the distribution of power and resources, conditions of daily life, and expectations and opportunities available to everyone”. She is looking forward to working with the Commission over the next three years.