Dr. Nwando Anyaoku. | Cecile Miller Photography
This story is from a speech at the annual Be Bold Now event, where women discussed leadership and power. Formidable was the media sponsor and we’ll highlight a new speaker each Friday. Listen to the full speech on the Formidable podcast.
Pediatrician Dr. Nwando Anyaoku recalls the time she once saw a baby who wasn’t her patient. She glanced at the baby’s sibling, noticed the same dry itchy rash, and suggested a treatment of olive oil and shea butter. “Simple stuff.”
Months later, the woman made another appointment, this time with Dr. Anyaoku, and told her that the remedy, amazingly, worked. The steroid creams previously prescribed had not.
“That conversation was not about my medical knowledge,” she says. “I was a mom of two brown-skinned children who had a similar experience. I was a Black woman. I knew of my traditional culture of using butters and oils to improve our skin.
“I think about that as we are now getting into the age of AI. If (as women) our voices are not there, what sorts of things are we going to be creating?
Dr. Anyaoku has served in senior executive roles at large health care systems, most recently as chief health, equity and clinical innovation officer at Providence, a $26 billion health system spanning seven states. She is also a two-time TEDx speaker who advises major tech companies on customer perspectives.
Here, in her own words, she discusses the gender equity gap in health care and urges women to share their unique experiences to drive change.
This story has been edited for length and clarity.
Research did not include women for years. The studies on heart disease were mostly on men. Don’t ask me how much time they spent studying erectile dysfunction. Finally, somebody has discovered that maybe they should pay attention to menopause.
But that’s at the 30,000-foot level. I want to talk about the individual level. How are we discounting our voice? How are we not stepping forward to say what we know?
We operate in so many spheres every day in our lives, and we count this knowledge as nothing. We don't think about it as strategy. We don't think about it as expertise. We just think, well, nobody really wants to hear that. But I think it's really important that we recognize that we have a unique power.
We are the connective tissues of our families and our communities, and asking women's voices into conversations doesn't just affect women. It affects men. It affects children, because we're the ones weaving it all together. And if we are not part of the conversation of all, if we don't bring our whole selves into that conversation, we are actually depriving the future of the value that we can add.
We think of it as modesty. But in a world where we are codifying things and saving it on servers, it's actually dangerous to not bring in what you know.
Like most people, I had to fight a battle to figure out how to own my voice, how to step into spaces and occupy them. It wasn't easy. I had to believe it before I could tell my story. Until you own it, you can't tell it. Until you believe it, you can't sell it. And you must sell it, because you hold the key to those blind spots that we have: in data, in society, in innovation.
Tell it at work. Tell it to the public. Tell it every chance you get. It's not bragging. It's creating the narrative that fills in the gaps, especially as we're building new things. When you do, you give somebody else permission to do the same, and that’s how we change things.
