#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.

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
• 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.

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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.

Accelerate women’s advancement in healthcare leadership by 50%

The Unlocking Eve Foundation, co-founded by Eva McLellan and Kaye Vitug, was born from the unwavering belief that enabling new models of balanced and integrated leadership is essential to transform healthcare and heal the world.

At the heart of their work is a dual mission: to advance a new profile of leadership excellence and to accelerate women’s advancement in healthcare leadership by 50%.

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

In a previous column in NLS, Eva McLellan, writes about their mission and a profound truth they have uncovered: leadership traits commonly associated with women – such as empathy, collaboration, and adaptability – are not just crucial for survival; they are essential for thriving in times of crisis.

3 X Women in Life Sciences

NLS has chosen 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.

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.

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.

Gitte Pedersen

Gitte Pedersen

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

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.

Donna Strickland

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.

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.