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.”
