Women in Neurosurgery Committee Report Souad Bakhti, Chair and Svitlana Iytvak, Co-Chair
This horrible year brought mourning to our entire planning and deprived us of our face-to- face meetings. We have lost also many of our brilliant colleagues from everywhere particularly the pioneer of women neurosurgeons in Indonesia (Jeanne Winatku). However, the members of the Women in Neurosurgery (WIN) Committee have been very active in collaborating with their colleagues around the world in different fields: books and articles, offers of scholarship, and webinars via several networks. For the first time the WIN Committee organized a physical course about myelomeningocele in conjunction with the 2nd Maghrebian Course in Mauritania (Feb 2020, Fig.1). Webinars were organized in collaboration with several societies: Algerian, Moroccan, and Pakistani. We have also collaborated with the WFNS Pediatric Committee. Several articles and chapters of book are in preparation, such the chapter about pediatric neurosurgery in the book of WFNS. Members of the WIN Committee have participated in the translation of a very beautiful book to promote female neurosurgery among young girls: “I want to be neurosurgeon”. Four members (Profs Kato, El Abbadi, Zanon, Bakhti, and Dr Karekezi) collaborated with colleagues from the ACNS-WIN in writing an article: “Women in Neurosurgery (WIN): Barriers to Progress, World WIN Directory and the Way Forward” published in Asian J Neurosurg 2020; 15: 828-32. The WIN Committee has participated in a wonderful project initiated by the journal Neurosurgical Focus. This issue will include several papers about WIN in different continents and regions around the world. By working in this project, we can update statistics of WIN in many countries (the results are reported in the different articles). Another paper has been submitted to the Journal of Neurosurgery about WIN in pediatric neurosurgery. This article has several co-authors who are members of the WIN Committee. We organized a WIN Committee session during the PANS Interim Congress in Dubai in October 2019. Finally Prof El Abbadi organized a WIN Session during the virtual congress of the Moroccan Society in December 2020. The WIN Committee hopes to do better this year in spite of these difficult times.
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