Sofia Gruskin named to Lancet’s Gender and Global Health Commission

Sofia Gruskin, JD, MIA, director of the USC Institute on Inequalities in Global Health and professor of preventive medicine, has been appointed to The Lancet’s Gender and Global Health Commission. Gruskin is among 25 independent commissioners, in addition to its three co-chairs, and one of the few hailing from the United States.

The Commission announced itself with an Aug. 4 Comment in The Lancet, the British-based medical journal. The piece noted how scholarship has long shown the ways gender inequalities drive overall inequalities in health, and emphasized the need for meaningful thought and resources to foster structural change.

This Commission has been set up with the explicit and uncompromising aim to move beyond the evidence to catalyse action. For change to happen, academic evidence is necessary but insufficient: the world does not need another report on the evidence and extent of a so-called gender problem in health. The Commission was borne of a collective and strategic understanding of the need to mobilise individuals and institutions to redress imbalances in the gender–health relationship, producing a politically informed, globally relevant, and intersectional feminist strategy for structural change in global health.

The Commission will meet for the first time in late 2020 and will work on a two-year timeframe that includes the production of a Lancet series, public engagement, analysis and action.