By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON
Three government experts on a health tech conference panel discuss the urgency of releasing actionable data; all are women. A more senior official, another woman, gives a TED-style talk making the same case. And a four-person, private-sector panel debates privacy and ethics; three of the four are female.
Health Datapalooza, a conference begun with government sponsorship a decade ago, proclaims its goal as “data liberación” – freeing health data from deep within federal agencies and giving it to patients and entrepreneurs. But in 2019, women’s “liberación” seems to have become an unspoken sub-theme.
Interestingly, while women’s status in tech was the focus of a plenary panel on diversity and inclusion, the panelists seemed oblivious to the robust participation of women in their own meeting.
To put some data behind my subjective impressions, I went back and examined the list of speakers, who came from a wide range of organizations and included individual patient activists. I counted 89 men and 99 women. Liberación, indeed.
