Frontiers in Global Women's Health: Choose to Challenge

Abstract

As a journal dedicated to improving the health and well-being of women across the world, the editorial team at Frontiers in Global Women's Health definitely #ChooseToChallenge on International Women's Day. Frontiers in Global Women's Health was launched as a new journal 1 year ago. Its mission was to “incorporate research from all disciplines related to the health problems facing women around the world.” We wanted to move away from the traditional biomedical model, which defines women's health purely in maternal, sexual and reproductive terms, toward a “life course approach that takes into account stressors as varied as climate change, infectious diseases, poverty, domestic violence and discrimination on the basis of gender.” As the first health journal in the Frontiers series with the word Global in its title, we also aimed to stress the importance of addressing issues that affect vulnerable women in low-to-middle income countries (LMICs), particularly those experiencing large-scale demographic, epidemiological, socioeconomic, and environmental transitions, in keeping with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the UN Global Strategy for Women's, Children's and Adolescents' Health (2016–2030). Our first year has unquestionably been a resounding success. We have surpassed all our expectations thanks to the hard work of our five Specialty Section Chief Editors (Georgina Jones, Quality of Life; Jayashri Kulkarni, Women's Mental Health; Laura A Magee, Maternal Health; Chelsea Morroni, Contraception & Family Planning, and Sanne Peters, Sex & Gender Differences in Disease), as well as our 50 Associate Editors, 52 Guest Associate Editors, and 189 Review Editors. To have recruited such a large body of dedicated collaborators so rapidly is a testament to the need for such a journal. We must also not forget the remarkable Frontiers admin team, all of whom have been totally committed to the journal's mission from the outset. What do I mean by success? To date, we have received a total of 141 manuscripts from authors in 42 countries, of which 43 have been accepted, 37 rejected, and the remainder are still under review. The published articles—a mixture of original research, reviews and study protocols—have been viewed and downloaded over 126,000 times. Coincidentally, the COVID-19 pandemic started at roughly the same time that we launched the journal. We therefore devoted one of our first Research Topics to the effect of the pandemic on global women's health. Understandably, this one topic has so far attracted the most submissions. One article Moms Are Not OK: COVID-19 and Maternal Mental Health by Margie Davenport and colleagues already has an Attention Score of 457, putting it in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric, including an article in the The New York Times. Given that the pandemic is continuing we decided last month to host a second edition of the COVID-19 & Women's Health Research Topic as the issues we now face from the pandemic are different to those we focused on last year: for example, new variants, vaccination (especially in pregnancy), long COVID, anxiety about fertility, and long-term psychosocial effects. We have so far initiated a total of 17 Research Topics in a wide range of subjects from Maternal Health in Conflict Settings to What Works to Address Sex and Gender Disparities in Health and Disease? Our plan now is to build on the first year's success by starting at least one new Speciality Section devoted to Infectious Disease and encouraging suggestions for more Research Topics. In particular, we want to reach out to researchers in the social sciences and humanities to enable us to broaden the journal's scope even further. We are actively seeking submissions from a range of disciplines that can help to contextualize the significance of global women's health issues at individual and population levels. We aim to highlight the multitude of factors that affect women's health across the world and, perhaps more importantly, the impact that the failure to prioritize global women's health has had, is having and will have on society as a whole. In doing so, we want to attract as broad a readership as possible, which definitely means taking account of how these problems have been addressed in the non-biomedical literature. In other words, we will be seeking articles in the future that enrich the reader's understanding of the complexity of the issues facing clinicians, human rights lawyers, non-governmental organizations, funding agencies, and governments that wish to improve the health and well-being of women in both LMICs and high income countries. To the best of my knowledge no other journal seeks to incorporate such a rich variety of knowledge, expertise, and opinions pertaining specifically to global women's health. Let me give you some examples of what I mean. It is difficult to appreciate global women's health issues without an understanding of their social and historical context, which is why we are encouraging submissions that take heed of Hegel's observation “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.” The present pandemic is a case in point. It is now acknowledged that Covid-19 is associated with substantially higher maternal and neonatal mortality and morbidity than was generally recognized at the start of the pandemic (1). Perhaps the lessons learned during the “Spanish flu” pandemic, which came in four waves between 1918 and 1920, resulting in the deaths of 20–50 million people worldwide, could have had a greater influence on thinking and health policies at...