This week was an intense recap of my current working life, with a red line through what I call my focus on ‘gender and generational balance.’
It started with an all-day session on gender balance for 120 leaders of a big, male-dominated multinational. Moved into a get together at the Royal Society of the Arts in London (the RSA) with all my British longevity colleagues uniting to get an interest group going there. And finished off at Murray Edwards College at Cambridge University speaking to the brilliant WIMIN conference uniting women in medicine. Gender, longevity and women, all my favourite and deeply inter-related themes.
The Gender Balance Hit List
At the first event, I was struck, as I always am, at the contradictions and complexities of gender work in companies in 2024. Here’s my short list:
it’s (still) usually run by women rather than leaders
they focus on ‘empowering’ women when…
…the real issue is developing ‘gender bilingualism’ (familiarity and skill with working across gender differences) for all
male leaders are usually readier to engage on gender balance than many (women) think (if broached in a non-accusatory way)
women are framed as a diversity dimension, even though they’re most of the talent and much of the market. And women don’t challenge this misframing - which makes sustainable change unlikely. Ladies, we aren’t ‘diverse’!
gender balance has little to do with women and much to do with leadership, culture and systems. And both men and women need to learn this before they divisively disappear into opposing camps.
a related article if you’re interested: 5 Myths Most Men (and Women) Still Believe
Women in Medicine
This was the third edition of WIMIN, a conference that brings senior women in medicine together for a couple of days of inspiration, sharing and networking. It’s always a bit daunting to hear what’s going in the NHS from the people who work deep within it. Especially as this week also saw the publication of the pretty damning, 142-page report from Lord Darzi, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (also a cancer surgeon and health minister under Gordon Brown). Here’s a summary letter of his findings and some highlights:
NHS waiting lists are causing 14,000 deaths / year
England’s A&E departments are in an “awful state”
a lack of capital investment has caused “crumbling” and “decrepit” buildings, some “infested with vermin”
the sorry state of the NHS is exacerbated by a general decline in health
Improvements in cancer survival rates “slowed substantially during the 2010s” - the UK now has higher cancer mortality than comparable countries.
In the UK, 2.8 million people can’t work because of long-term sickness.
But it’s all the more inspiring to hear how tenaciously these women are pushing to hold up their agendas in difficult circumstances. Whether it’s Henrietta Bowden Jones, VP of the Royal Society of Medicine, fighting gambling addiction, or Dr Lade Smith, on mental health, or Dame Lesley Regan on maternal health, especially the horrendous outcome gaps for women and babies of colour.
I was marked by Professor Sharon Peacock’s description of her March 2020, when she invented, organised and led the Covid 19 gene sequencing in a matter of days, bringing together multiple stakeholders and players who had never worked together. She didn’t really have a mandate, she admits, everyone was learning to fly a plane that was in the air. But she quickly became the founding director of COG-UK (COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium), formed in April 2020 to generate SARS-CoV-2 genomes to inform the pandemic response.
One of her favourite images, “that proves Darwin right,” is the one below, showing how from a mass of different viruses and variants, one came to dominate from March 2020 to the following year. First Alpha, then Delta. That’s nature at work. A bit terrifying, and awe inspiring.
She presented her key takeaways from this time. How much two decades of genomics research had paved the way for the UK to be in a position to carry out the genome sequencing to understand the virus. How previous viral outbreaks had allowed them to test the theories with experience. And how funding had strengthened the infrastructure to respond when the pandemic hit.
It struck me as an apt parallel for life and ageing. The future is so unpredictable, and change now so fast-moving, that it’s not helpful to really prepare for any given scenario. But you can try to get ready. Your past will hugely predict and contribute to your future - profession, health, habits, connections. Practice and experience allows you to build and grow from these foundations. And a constant investment in your own infrastructures (health, community, relevance) will keep you future-ready.
I found Sharon Peacock an inspiration (among many). She told me that at 65, she had just spent the past year hugely investing in her own health and strength. She was preparing for her next chapter, as she’s accepted to become the 8th master of Churchill college, Cambridge. An 8-year term.
Love is Love
“Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.”
This is a quote from French actress Jeanne Moreau, cited in a lovely story of late love in this week’s Toronto Star newspaper, thanks to reader Paul for sharing it. It tells the story of two 80-year-olds, widowed from first marriages, who find love and joy in their latter years. And points to some of the research suggesting this may be good for both lifespans and healthspans. Although it also notes the gendered nature of some of the statistics:
“The benefits of romantic relationships can also be gendered. Loneliness is more common in married women than married men, Savage said. Repartnering can be “critical” for addressing loneliness in men. It’s also important for women, Savage added, but noted women tend to have bigger social circles that can help them stay socially connected. “For men, living alone is a much stronger predictor of loneliness than for women,” she said.”
If you want to see this quote brought to life, read the wonderful book I just finished early this morning, Tell Me Everything, from Elisabeth Strout. I don’t know if you are a fan, but I’ve read everything she’s written since Olive Kitteridge. Where some are Swifties, I’m a Stroutian through and through. Her light, almost painterly depictions of a small town in Maine bring universality and a profound humanity to a microcosm. Her novels weave a tale through a cast of characters whose lives are described across decades and debacles. Death, suicide, depression, abuse and rising intolerances quietly rip through this deceptively simple tale. But so do friendship, family and sibling bonds. And love.
The novel ends with the lost, hapless character of Matt, brought back to life and love by his lawyer’s innate goodness and his own metaphorical paintings of pregnant women. We can birth a better life, if we love. “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love. If it’s love, then it’s love,” Lucy Barton finally shares with Olive, both of whom we have known, across these many books, for all their lives.
This book gifts us one of the loveliest depictions of friendship I’ve ever read, between two very old women, who remind me of my mother and her best friend. They were similarly and fiercely loyal to each other - right to the end. Love is love.
And it’s powerful stuff.