Dr Kate Stannard and Dr Helen Burdett on the need to address the underrepresentation of women in medical conferences.  

We set up the Women in Medicine International Network (WIMIN) after having become increasingly disillusioned with conferences that bore little relevance to our practices. We found they were often run by white men, leaving women underrepresented and our voices not heard. Conferences aimed at women were often focussed on topics such as maternity leave and part-time working, which are important but don’t cover the full breadth of relevant issues. It dawned on us that we don’t work in isolation so why do we learn in silo-based conferences? So WIMIN was born to modernise learning and to include doctors from primary, secondary and tertiary care. We both have extensive experience in education and training as College Tutors in our trusts and as current FRCA Examiners for the RCoA so we had a very clear vision of what was needed and felt confident we could pull it off!  

We wanted to start addressing difficult but important issues that contribute to the high attrition rate among women in medicine, especially within hospital specialties including anaesthesia. Our conferences create a safe space to discuss topics such as mental health and sexual discrimination. We were fortunate last year to be joined by Professor Carrie Newlands, Co-Lead of the Working Party on Sexual Misconduct in Surgery, who presented findings of the Working Party’s report.   

Increasingly our focus has turned towards women as patients and how their voices are also often unheard and the differential care they can receive. For example, in the UK black mothers have a nearly fourfold chance of dying on a labour ward compared to their white counterparts. At our next conference we will have the founder of The Motherhood Group, Sandra Igwe, who has campaigned tirelessly for black mothers, along with Professor Dame Lesley Regan, Women’s Health Ambassador for England.  

WIMIN support doctors in training through the Liz Sizer Memorial Award. The prize has been donated by Liz’s family. Dr Liz Sizer was a consultant Intensivist and Anaesthetist at King’s College Hospital who tragically died by suicide leaving a young family behind. Her sister now works to raise awareness of depression and suicide risk in doctors. Last year’s winning poster was from an ENT team at Addenbrookes University NHS trust who set up a project in Malawi supplying bone conduction headphones to help deaf girls stay in education (11% of 4–6-year-olds in Malawi are deaf). The winners donated their prize money to the project in Malawi to buy more headsets and Addenbrookes NHS Trust matched the prize money. Their poster is now on display in Queen’s Hospital, Blantyre, Malawi.  

We run WIMIN as not for profit and organise everything in our ‘spare’ time. We also try to keep the meetings affordable. We could not do what we do without the support of our fantastic sponsors, human rights law firm Leigh Day, who kindly help finance meetings and whose inspiring lawyers have given up their time to come and speak.  

However, we wanted to help women in other parts of the world who are far less fortunate. We are delighted to support ASIGE (Advocacy for Social Inclusion and Girls’ Education), a charity started by social entrepreneur Dorcas Apoore. ASIGE helps girls and women in the most marginalised communities in Northern Ghana through education, sexual health measures and employment. To date, WIMIN has supplied girls from five high schools in the region with reusable sanitary protection enabling them to stay in education. We also work closely with Dr Deb Brown, a researcher at Cambridge University, who has supported Dorcas as well as income-generating projects in communities in Ghana and Zimbabwe via Mmaa Social.   

We aim for our meetings to be educational but also nurturing. We hold them in enjoyable locations with plenty of time for networking and even yoga - providing time out of busy lives to enjoy exchanging ideas and experiences. Feedback from delegates has been excellent, and our work has received media coverage in the UK and internationally in Forbes. We are keen for women to take up more space in the educational and academic arena so if you are interested in finding out more about our work and future conferences, please visit our website.