#IWD 2025: Accelerate Action, Leadership & Women in Life Sciences

This year’s campaign emphasizes the urgency and importance of accelerating efforts to eliminate systemic barriers and biases that impede women’s equality. Women’s health continues to be plagued by fundamental gaps in treatment efficacy, care delivery, research, innovation, data and investment, according to the World Economic Forum.

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Empowering Women’s Leadership in Health and Life Sciences

It’s an exciting time to be a part of Norway’s health and life science environment, with a marked uptick in activity and a distinct sense of progress brewing.

Equal access to quality health solutions

The World Economic Forum’s Champions for Women’s Health, a community of senior global leaders from diverse industries and sectors, have outlined five priority areas: amplifying and centring women’s voices in the conversation; safeguarding women and girls’ agency to exercise bodily autonomy; uplifting adolescent girls and breaking cycles of poverty; mainstreaming women’s health across healthcare; and maximizing social and political capital for women.

These areas not only embody the rights, equality and empowerment framework for this year’s International Women’s Day theme; they also encapsulate the Global Alliance for Women’s Health’s vision to promote equal access to quality health solutions when and where women need it, and at a price that they can afford, they state.

Integrated Leadership

In a previous Column in NLS, the co-founder of Unlocking Eve, Eva McLellan, writes about integrated leadership and that the future of humanity hinges on how we invest in people, particularly leaders, right now. 

Kaye Viltug and Eva McLellan, co-founders, Unlocking Eve

Unlocking Eve was born in Davos 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when co-founders Eva McLellan and Kaye Vitug, made a crucial observation: countries led by women experienced six times fewer confirmed deaths from COVID-19 in the early stages of the pandemic than those governed by men.

Women-led governments were not only more effective at flattening the curve but were also better at making swift, inclusive decisions that balanced public health with economic stability.

This finding, based on the analysis of 194 countries, struck a chord. Women-led governments were not only more effective at flattening the curve but were also better at making swift, inclusive decisions that balanced public health with economic stability. With women saving more lives, they asked: what lessons can all leaders learn from these examples?

3 X Women in Life Sciences

NLS would like to highlight three of the many inspiring women in life science that we have had the opportunity to meet and interview throughout the years.

Bahija Jallal

Bahija Jallal’s curiosity and passion for science have been strong driving forces throughout her entire career, as has her belief in the need for diversity to truly bring forth innovation.

I definitely think it’s important for women in life science to have role models. I have always had mentors and tried to pay that forward by being mentors for others, both men and women.

Gitte Pedersen

An adventurous spirit rooted in a Viking heritage and her parents’ as an example helped spur Gitte Pedersen to move from her native Denmark to the U.S. 20 years ago, where she helped create a company and made a home.

I started my own company because there is no glass ceiling in a house you build yourself.

Donna Strickland

Science has always been a driving force in Donna Strickland’s life. From the moment she discovered the world of laser physics, she’s been entranced by all the possibilities lasers represent for research, science and medicine.

Donna Strickland. Photo: Alexander Mahmoud/Nobel Media AB

There is a sense of change that is happening for women in science and there’s been a lot of work to get that change. I feel it won’t be very many years before we see more women getting the Nobel Prizes in medicine and science.