Global Health Otherwise shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Who Gets to Shape Global Health, and How Do We Measure It?
Global health, the field that addresses health challenges across countries and populations, has long been controlled by a small, powerful group: mostly men from wealthy nations. Van Daalen and colleagues (2026) offer a critical review of how researchers try to measure this imbalance, and why those measurement methods often fall short.
The authors build their case by showing that over 80% of chief executives in global health organisations are based in high-income countries, with women from poorer nations holding only about 5% of leadership roles.
To expose these gaps, researchers commonly use tools like name-based algorithms or photo analysis to guess people’s gender, race, or nationality. However, van Daalen and colleagues (2026) find these tools frequently misclassify people, especially those from non-Western backgrounds or with marginalised identities, causing real harm.
The authors recommend five guiding principles: refusing inference when it risks harm, prioritising self-reported data, matching methods to context, protecting stored data, and maintaining transparency. They stress that counting diversity means nothing without genuine redistribution of power.
Van Daalen and colleagues (2026) argue that measuring diversity in global health requires ethical, self-reported methods, because flawed inference tools reinforce the very inequities researchers aim to expose.”
Title: Methods with consequences: analysing demographic diversity in global health governance and knowledge production
Authors: Kim R van Daalen, Sara Dada, Seye Abimbola, Soumyadeep Bhaumik, Bagele Chilisa, Govindi Deerasinghe, Catherine Kyobutungi, Sanne A E Peters, Alexandra L Phelan, Aishwarya Rajeev, Nicole Redvers, Lynsey Robinson, Anna Stewart-Ibarra, Arthur Wyns, Zahra Zeinali, Joseph M Zulu
Other articles about Global Health Otherwise on OncoDaily.