Mika Simmons & Nimco Ali
The remarkable duo are reigniting the fight to close the gender-health gap with a new board
‘Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you,’ the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said. It’s a philosophy that inspired the actress and director Mika Simmons and the activist Nimco Ali to join forces and set up the Ginsburg Women’s Health Board, which aims to revolutionise the healthcare system. ‘We want to fight,’ says Ali, who has campaigned against female genital mutilation (FGM) since 2010, ‘but we also want people to come with us.’
After all, gender discrimination within healthcare has recently been making headlines. In 2019, Caroline Criado Perez’s book Invisible Women exposed the data bias endemic DESIGN in medical DUO trials; the UK currently has the largest gender-health gap of all the G20 countries.
When Ali met Simmons at the members’ club AllBright last year, they discovered a shared determination to change the status quo. ‘I’ve always been an odd person out. I am a woman, I am Black, and I had FGM,’ says Ali. ‘I was angry at the beginning of my activism; it could be soul-destroying. There’s a place for anger, but I value compassion, and finding the opportunities to move things forward.’ Her affection for the NHS is a reason for precipitating change. ‘My greatest experience with a national institution was with health. It was a place that could physically heal me and had an emotional role to play. But it has been disengaged with women. It doesn’t see us as individuals.’
Simmons has created an open dialogue around gynaecological health through her podcast The Happy Vagina and the charity Lady Garden Foundation, set up after her mother’s death from ovarian cancer. ‘My mum’s GP said that her bloating was “probably fibroids”,’ says Simmons. ‘By the time she was seen at the fibroids clinic, she already had stage-four cancer, and died nine months later. That’s why I’m so passionate about changing the pathways of diagnosis.’ The pair have brought together women across different disciplines, including the fertility specialist Professor Geeta Nargund, the musician Anoushka Shankar and the former BBC Today programme editor Sarah Sands, to exercise their voice and influence. I, too, am privileged to be a part of the group, which aims to tackle the genderhealth gap in three ways: by changing the way medical data is collected, by speeding up the diagnostic process through quick and accurate referrals from GPs, and by educating the public so that they are better informed when asking for help. The board will meet with the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, later this month, to focus on gynaecological issues ‘from puberty to menopause’. As Ali says: ‘I always tell ministers, “If you want to go fast, you go alone; if you want to go far, you go together”.’