Unpacking the SAGER Guidelines: A Roundtable Discussion on Achieving Gender Equity in Research

Dr. Shirin Heidari is the founding president of GENDRO, an association with the mission to advance gender-sensitive research and data analysis. She is also Senior Technical Consultant on Gender and Health to World Health Organization (WHO). In parallel, Senior Researcher at the Global Health Center and Research Affiliate at the Gender Center at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, in Geneva.

Before joining the Graduate Institute, Dr Heidari was the Executive Director of Reproductive Health Matters and Editor-in-Chief of its peer-reviewed journal, and prior to that she oversaw the Research Promotion Department of the International AIDS Society and was the editor of the Journal of the International AIDS Society. She received her doctorate degree in clinical virology and experimental oncology from Karolinska Institute in 2001, where she continued as an HIV researcher until she moved to Geneva in 2007.

She has been a board member of Amnesty International, Sweden and is the founding chair of the Gender Policy Committee of the European Association of Science Editors (EASE). She is the lead author of the Sex and Gender Equity in Research (SAGER) guidelines and has given a TEDx talk encouraging gender-sensitive research and scholarly communication.

Vivienne C. Bachelet is an MD and has a MSc in Clinical Epidemiology. In 2001, she founded Medwave, a peer-reviewed general medical journal. In 2016, she joined the Universidad de Santiago de Chile as an associate professor in the School of Medicine, where she heads the Evidence-based Medicine Unit.  Vivienne was a member of the COPE council from January 2016 to September 2019. Since 2015, she has been a member of the Advisory Board of the International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication. In 2023, she won the ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing 2023 (Manchester) for her contribution to bilingualism in scholarly communication. This year she was invited to join the ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors) on behalf of her journal. Her areas of expertise are research methods, observational field studies, publication ethics and research integrity, evidence-based medicine, conduct and management of health research projects, quality management (ISO standards), e-learning and flipped classroom methods, health policies and policy briefs, editorial leadership, and gender perspective and feminism conceptual frameworks.

Mikashmi Kohli, PhD in molecular medicine, is a TB diagnostics specialist. She has worked with the Cochrane Systematic Review team on diagnostic accuracy of molecular tests in TB, and was a co-author of the Lancet Commission on Diagnostics report. She has led TB policy at FIND and is currently Senior Manager, Evidence and Policy.

Agnieszka Freda is Executive Publisher in Elsevier’s Health and Medical Sciences journal publishing team. She has been at Elsevier for 11 years. While managing key psychiatry journals for years she has been heavily involved in building an action plan to increase editorial diversity, focusing on targeted support for publishers and journals, best practice, research and training for publishers and editors, and improved reporting as well as Sex and Gender Reporting in research.

Simone Carter is an epidemiologist working in public health and emergency response based in sub-Saharan Africa for the past 15+ years. During the 2018-20 Ebola outbreak in the DRC she, together with WHO, CDC, MSF-Epicentre and IFRC, and under the DRC Ministry of Health, set up the collaborative, multi actor and discipline Integrated Outbreak Analytics approach. Since, she remains the DRC and global UNICEF lead on IOA, focusing on context and community specific analysis to inform response.

Bahar is peer review innovation lead at Elsevier and oversees the peer review strategy and innovation for Elsevier journals. She is the chair of the recently launched Peer Review Workbench, a unique dataset allowing evidence-based research in peer review. She received her PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Amsterdam and moved to the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light to pursue her academic career as a postdoc. She joined Elsevier in 2013 as a managing editor and since then has studied peer review as a scientific research topic. Bahar is vice president of the European Association of Science Editors, and co-chair of NISO's Inclusion, Equity, Diversity, and Accessibility committee.