Her Voice Belongs in the Room
Washington has a way of making any gathering sound important. Put researchers, advocates, physicians, entrepreneurs, and people who write policy in one room to talk about women's health, though, and it gets hard to dismiss how much of the problem lives outside any one of their fields.
The WHH Washington, D.C. Summit Wednesday, Oct. 7, presented by Women’s Health Horizons in partnership with the Society for Women's Health Research and Women’s Health Advocates, provided exactly this kind of room. Our executive director, Dr. Odessa Lacsina, was there to speak about The State of Women Institute and the work of moving past awareness and into action. She also brought two guests — Uschi Keszler and Dr. Vonnya Pettigrew, who may be familiar to you from earlier posts — and we were proud to have them both there.
Two Women, One Phone Call
Uschi Keszler's first career was elite sport. She competed in the Olympics, then became a six-time Olympic coach who worked with some of figure skating's most accomplished competitors. After surviving breast cancer and uterine cancer, the discipline she had spent years asking of athletes went into Pennies in Action, which she founded in 2007 to support cancer research and clinical trials that may carry promising new treatments to patients.
A few months ago, Dr. Lacsina was preparing to speak to a room of Caribbean women about cancer and, being a scientist, looked up the numbers first. Barbados, she found, has the third-highest mortality rate in the world for triple-negative breast cancer — an aggressive form of the disease with no standard targeted therapy that falls hardest on women of African descent. Dr. Lacsina is of Barbadian and Guyanese descent, and some of the women in that risk group came from her ancestral homeland. Many of them, she noted, may not even know the risk exists.
She picked up the phone and called Keszler, a close friend.
Dr. Lacsina advises Pennies in Action on science, and the organization supports Dr. Brian Czerniecki's immunotherapy research at Moffitt Cancer Center, so it turned out to be exactly the right call. It grew into a collaboration with Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Barbados, Czerniecki's team, the V Foundation, and others. They won a feasibility grant, then wrote a proposal to the Department of Defense for a larger international grant to bring DC1 immunotherapy research to Barbados.
It’s an inspiring story, but the catch also makes it concerning: The magic worked, this time, because two people already knew each other. Progress should not rest so much on who has access to whom. Plenty of people who see a number like that have no one to call.
Before the Stereotype Does
Dr. Pettigrew started in media. She founded Root Branch Media Group in 2006, and it has since grown to include a film academy for K–12 students, a marketplace for local small businesses, a job-training program called G.R.O.W., and an arts and outreach institute. The aim, she has said, is to let people tell their own stories before someone else does — or before a stereotype does.
That sounds like a media goal, and it is. It is also a health goal. What a woman knows about her own risk; whether she sees anyone like herself in the institutions meant to serve her; and whether she has somewhere to learn, work, and belong all shape how she deals with the health system. Whether a woman gets screened, or trusts the person explaining her results, can depend on whether she has ever seen anyone who looks like her in that office. It’s a crucial question to the conversation about women’s health: What does health equity look like outside the hospital?
The Numbers That Meant Nothing
Access was also the subject of Dr. Lacsina’s talk — though she came at it from a different direction. As an NIH Fogarty International Fellow, she worked at a community hospital in Kenya that had received donated equipment from well-meaning organizations — cutting-edge machines for a small rural lab. The lab ran out of the reagent needed to calibrate one of them. Staff kept running tests anyway, because patients had waited for hours and no one wanted to tell them the results meant nothing. People were making life-and-death decisions from those numbers.
Dr. Lacsina placed the responsibility on how researchers in the global north — herself included — design studies as though one size fits all. Care without infrastructure, she said, is only the appearance of care. Washington is where policy gets written and funding gets decided. Whoever does the deciding hears about a missing reagent only if someone who has stood in that lab is there to say so.
She also told a smaller story alongside it: a college classroom where a professor once asked her to count the female professors. She counted one. Her daughter is 11. Dr. Lacsina would like her to walk into a classroom someday and find women who look like her leading the room.
One Conversation
Keszler, Dr. Pettigrew, and Dr. Lacsina each address representation, advocacy, and women’s health from different angles. That’s what made Wednesday’s room so impactful, and it’s what makes the next room, and the next one and the next, so essential. Lived experiences, passions, expertise, connections. Women’s voices and stories. They belong in every room.
Dr. Lacsina closed with a reminder of why the room exists. Washington is where policy gets written, where funding gets decided, where the decisions that shape health infrastructure are made. The State of Women Institute came to support, collaborate, and amplify the work being done, and her ask was a simple one: if your work touches any of our three pillars — mental health and wellness, maternal health equity, and preventive wellness — start a conversation with her and with The State of Women Institute.
We have a couple of those conversations already underway — with Keszler and Pennies in Action around cancer research and preventive wellness, and with Dr. Pettigrew and Root Branch around health equity, media, and mentorship for women coming up in health communications — as well as with some other amazing women and organizations we’re beginning to work with, some of whom we just met at the summit.
We intend to keep going. If your work belongs in the room too — and we believe it does — you know where to find us.
The State of Women Institute is a global 501(c)(3) nonprofit advancing women's health equity through research, innovation, and community engagement across three pillars: Mental Health and Wellness, Maternal Health Equity, and Preventive Wellness. Learn more at thestateofwomen.org.