WIO lunch keynote Dr Lily Vrtik left with outgoing chair Prof Dame Helen Danesh-Meyer centre and incoming chair A/Prof Penny Allen

After more than six years at the helm, Professor Dame Helen Danesh-Meyer has stepped down as chair of RANZCO’s influential Women in Ophthalmology (WIO) committee.

Handing the reins to new chair Associate Professor Penny Allen at the WIO luncheon at the RANZCO 2025 Scientific Congress, Prof Dame Danesh-Meyer said her view of women in medicine was shaped by her mother. One of the earliest women to enter medical school in Iran, her journey was incredibly difficult, she said. “Her family thought it was absurd. Why not be a teacher, a nurse or, best yet, the best wife you can be! Medical school was brutal: sexual harassment was routine, bullying was accepted, she wasn't allowed to enter the library. In lectures, she could only sit if there were no men in the room… If she tried to answer a question, she was jeered. If she stayed silent, she was rebuked. So she broke the glass ceiling but bled from the shards.”

Compared to her mother’s experience, the younger Dr Danesh-Meyer thought she had it easy because she could just be ‘one of the guys’. It was only much later, when she was a professor, that she realised embracing her womanhood was not a weakness, and that many of the same inequalities her mother had faced were still there, just packaged differently. “Women surgeons are still called ‘nurse’. When a female registrar’s operation takes longer, people whisper, ‘she must not be a natural surgeon’; when a male registrar takes the same time, they declare, ‘complicated case’. The platforms haven't disappeared; they've only evolved their camouflage.”

Prof Dame Danesh-Meyer replaced Christchurch-based retinal surgeon Dr Genevieve Oliver as WIO chair in 2019 after spending many years working together as WIO Advisory Group members to develop a strategic action plan. This aimed to build awareness, recognition and engagement of women in ophthalmology by increasing their presence at conferences, facilitating more awards and research grants for them and building and strengthening networks to support them through all stages of their careers.

To this end, WIO created the WIO speaker series – showcasing extraordinary women in ophthalmology – and the WIO Tick and Speaker Bureau to encourage conference organisers to put more women speakers on the programme and to counter, “the stubborn survival of the manel (all-male panels),” said Prof Dame Danesh-Meyer. “A species we thought would be extinct by now, but appears remarkably hardy.”

WIO has also encouraged more research grants for female ophthalmologists, especially those returning to work after having children, launched a webinar series, ‘Myths and Realities’, featuring six outstanding female ophthalmologists who candidly discuss their journeys and hurdles, and the successful podcast series, 10-minutes of Science, tackling topical areas of clinical practice.

Drs Liz Insull and Pragnya Jagadish

Key to the transformative nature of WIO was the research Prof Dame Danesh-Meyer undertook with Kiwi counterparts Dr Hannah Gill and Associate Professor Rachael Niederer, to examine the surgical experience of female ophthalmology trainees. At four years, this showed the mean total surgical volume for females was 21.1% lower than males overall and 41.7% lower for cataract surgery¹! These astonishing results led RANZCO to make it compulsory for trainers to report gender split in surgical cases² in 2021.

“But Covid also taught us that while evidence is power, so is collectiveness; the charge we generate from each other,” said Prof Dame Danesh-Meyer. This led her and colleagues, Drs Liz Insull and Pragnya Jagadish, to establish the biennial Women in Vision Aotearoa conference in 2022, which was expanded in 2024 to include optometrists.

Acknowledging the support of the WIO team, including continuing vice-chair Associate Professor Elaine Chong, head of Ophthalmology at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, and RANZCO’s Alex Aranciba, Prof Dame Danesh-Meyer handed the reins to A/Prof Allen, head of the Bionic Eye Project at CERA and the Vitreoretinal Surgical Unit at The Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital.

Before introducing the 2025 WIO lunch speaker, plastic and reconstructive surgeon Dr Lily Vrtik, A/Prof Allen acknowledged Prof Dame Danesh-Meyer’s “amazing” contributions to promoting women in ophthalmology, saying she always leads by example and advocates fiercely. “The testament to this is the number of women who are keynote speakers at this [RANZCO 2025] conference – six out of 11. Her passion and her perseverance have paid off, and she’s greatly admired by all of us.”

References

1. Gill HK, Niederer RL, Danesh-Meyer HV. Gender differences in surgical case volume among ophthalmology trainees. Clin Experiment Ophthalmol. 2021; 49(7): 664- 671
2. https://ranzco.edu/home/news-and-publications/publications/eye2eye/ Quarter 4, 2021, Vol 24, Issue 4, pp7-9