April 2025 • PharmaTimes Magazine • 12-13
// WOMEN //
Sex and drugs
“Women in power are seen as breaking down barriers, or alternatively as taking something to which they are not quite entitled” Mary Beard
I was in a Land Rover showroom the other day. It is my guilty pleasure to test-drive cars I can’t afford but with a genuine aspiration to one day own one.
I have too many children and animals and a battered nine-year-old Discovery, so I was being true to my own desires. Sue me.
Allow me to set the scene for something that happens often but shouldn’t. Ever. I had driven the car and made buying noises. The husband was not in the car for the test drive. We sat down in the plush surroundings, drinking their coffee, discussing when I might ever be able to buy the car. My car.
The manager, John, joined us. John reached out his hand, ignoring my outstretched one, to shake the husband’s hand. The husband, who had up to this point only been interested in the free coffee and the potential for a Burger King next door after I had finished messing around with cars. John ignored me and my hand.
I said: “Erm, actually it is my car we are discussing, and my husband is just here for the coffee.” John could not compute this. He didn’t address a single comment or platitude to me, just the male with the assumed purchasing power. They then had a brief man-off, trading unintelligible volleys about %APR and government taxes.
I interjected a few more times before I got bored and started filing my nails with an imaginary nail file because that is clearly what John assumed I should be doing. The female sales assistant next to him smirked knowingly.
Dear John
Midway through our drive home (after a Burger King), I scared the husband by laughing anew at the ridiculous scenario that had just unfolded. I then recalled where I had recently been made aware of another John in a similar situation. Comedian and powerhouse Cally Beaton is an Instagram favourite of mine.
She was a senior TV exec at MTV, responsible for shows like South Park and SpongeBob SquarePants, and finished her TV exec career as SVP at Viacom. You can picture the professional environment she grew up in. Back to John, though. In her brilliant second career as an author, stand-up comic, and corporate speaker, she was earlier this year approached by a big corporation.
They wanted her to deliver an International Women’s Day gig. She met with the marketing team, and all was decided and going well. Cally was looking forward to it – it is truly in her wheelhouse to talk about this area in a corporate setting. As she tells it on her channels, she was about to leave the meeting when the CEO entered the room.
“Let’s call him John,” she says. And there he is again. John. He asked her two questions: “Why do you think you are equipped to do this gig for us on International Women’s Day?” and “Well, now that women don’t have any issues in the workplace anymore, what exactly do you talk about?”
You, John, you. That’s what she talks about.
Mary Beard, in Women and Power: A Manifesto, discusses this paradigm perfectly. She is quoted at the beginning of my piece, raising thoughtful questions about how we perceive women in power and the stories – both amusing and unsettling, like the John stories – that we have told ourselves and others about them for thousands of years, at least in the West.
I promise this column is not going to be a feminist rant, but I want to use what I have personally experienced to show how far our industry has come. I also want to prove it hasn’t all been said already about the gender gap and issues with equity in the workplace.
Work in progress
When I was asked to focus on women in pharma for this issue, my first jaded response was, “It has all been said, what else can I raise? What is left to say, surely we must now do?” That is the theme of this year’s International Women’s Day organisation – ‘Accelerate Action.’
‘Wearing trousers. Having powerful jobs. Excelling in sports. Having a voice. We have done this very well
and are thriving in some senses’
It will soon be time for corporations to compile their gender pay gap reports and revisit their annual membership of menopause manifestos. They’ll rewrite their maternity, paternity (and fertility in some wonderful places) packages, which seem like an endless task for all HR colleagues. They’ll constantly revise the benefits package to deliver balance and what is right.
It is vital but seemingly thankless. Yet still, women sense that our right to equity in our workplaces is second-rate and boils down to a policy that ticks a box. Why is it that we feel we are not entitled to the power and authority that our male colleagues take without question?
Is it a cultural bedrock of misogyny that implies men’s competence, knowledge and proficiency should be deferred to? Is it that the definition of ‘power’ in the traditional sense, and ‘knowledge’, ‘expertise’ and ‘authority’ are words that exclude women? I Googled ‘power’ – only the male pronoun was used in the Oxford online definition.
‘He was a power in the university.’ ‘He powered around a bend.’ ‘Nicholas powered a header into the net.’ I Googled ‘authority’ – just the male pronoun again: ‘He had absolute authority over his subordinates.’ ‘He has the natural authority of one who is used to being obeyed.’ ‘He hit the ball with authority.’
‘He was an authority on the stock market.’ Ye gods, you see where I am going, right? Culture is perpetuating the myth. Yes, it is happily the case that there are now more women in what are considered ‘powerful’ positions. We only have to look at the ABPI current board, for example.
Eleven of the elected 28 members are CEOs, MDs and GMs of UK-based pharmaceutical companies and affiliates. Still a minority, but there are more now than ten or 15 years ago. Yet the cultural premise is to assume that our template for ‘being in power’ remains male. Culture is coded ‘male’.
Soft. Gentle. Caring. Empathetic. Look around the meeting or office you might currently be in, virtually or in person, whilst zoning out reading this ramble, and, without thinking too deeply, who in the room would you assign those adjectives to? Quickly, don’t think, just do. (Okay – if there are no women in the room, I have questions!)
Women wonder
If you, regardless of your own gender, immediately landed on the women in the group, you are not at fault – this is how we have been coded.
We have learned to see the world in a particular way. Caitlin Moran, in her book What About Men?, laments that so much of the male coding is because women have been given permission to take the great bits of being male and make them our own.
Wearing trousers. Having powerful jobs. Excelling in sports. Having a voice. We have done this very well and are thriving in some senses – we no longer feel we need to wear the power suit and behave like the lads to ‘fit in’. But men and boys, in return, have not been given permission by society to embrace the great bits of being female without being coded as ‘weak’.
In our own empathetic, caring yet commercial industry, we are learning and leaning towards equity. It is fair to say that we are ‘breaking down barriers’ and embracing powers that society doesn’t seem to think we are permitted to have because we mostly all have our heads in the right place. Well done, pharma.
Women in pharma don’t need a ‘leg up’ to ‘knock on the door’ of power and authority. We don’t need to ‘power grab’ or ‘smash the glass ceiling’ because good decisions should be genderless. We increasingly have a voice, and the arguments have all been had (the pay gap is still to be addressed).
That patients have access to medicines is a purpose that is without gender bias and is not a power play – it is a mission that our industry upholds and should cherish. What we do need to see addressed is the unconscious bias around authority – not just holding the ‘position’ and having the seat at the table but being equal.
An eradication of the irrational social conditioning that makes women, well, less – less able to buy their own car.
Hayley Wood is Head of Communications at Merck Healthcare UKIE
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