“Patriarchy dominates cancer care, research and policymaking. People in positions of power decide what is prioritized, funded and studied,” write the authors of “Women Power and Cancer” in a Lancet study published September 27, 2023 in the authoritative British medical journal. A pave in the pond launched by specialists in the management and prevention of cancers, epidemiologists, but also experts in gender, law or economics, after a study carried out in 185 countries.
“Do not restrict women to their genitals”
The public health challenges are colossal on an international scale. “Among the 2.3 million women who die prematurely from cancer each year, 1.5 million deaths could be avoided thanks to primary prevention strategies (reduction of causes and risk factors) or early detection, and 800,000 Additional deaths could be avoided if all women worldwide could access optimal cancer care,” reads the study’s key findings.
“The commission presents a fairly new vision in the sense that it highlights that female cancers cannot be limited to gynecological or breast cancers; there are also, for example, among the very common cancers, lung and colorectal cancers, comment for 20 minutes Simone Mathoulin Pelissier, director of ISPED, Institute of Public Health, Epidemiology and Development of the University of Bordeaux. We must stop restricting women to their genitals. » Education and the functioning of society tend to make women feel less concerned about certain cancers, and therefore screen themselves less well.
Access to knowledge, crucial for better care
In health matters too, information is power. “Access to information must certainly be reviewed according to gender, this is what this commission explains,” reports Simone Mathoulin Pelissier. And I add according to the socio-economic level, because it is a question of adapting the message to the public, and to their education. » Access to knowledge regarding the causes of cancer must be improved, according to the authors of the study, particularly regarding exposure to occupational and environmental factors, some of which have only recently been known.
The commission also considers that there are few actions to carry out primary prevention of cancers that affect women and recommends more research on the subject. “It’s interesting, but at the same time it must also be said that we don’t have much either [en prévention primaire] on prostate cancer,” estimates the director of ISPED.
Parity is advancing, and so are leaderships?
Today in France, there is a regulatory obligation for parity in research, “but that does not mean an obligation for leadership,” says Simone Mathoulin Pelissier. To be a leader in your profession, you must, for example, chair a university or an important structure. “You just need to take a stroll on social networks, in commissions or congresses to see that there are often few women there,” she points out. For example, it remains more difficult for a young woman leader in her field to have a family life.
The director of ISPED still welcomes highly symbolic victories, such as the fact that there are several women in France professors of urological surgery. A post which marks, according to her, that a real step has been taken.
We can wonder if certain women, having integrated the workings of patriarchy, do not reproduce the same pitfalls as their male colleagues when they have responsibilities. A vast question addressed to the sociological field to know whether we must transform things from the inside or whether we are necessarily prisoners of a system that raised us.