International Women's Day 2025: Marching forward to improve women’s sexual and reproductive health
Professor Danielle Mazza AM
Professor Danielle Mazza AM, women's health expert, Director of SPHERE Centre for Research Excellence and Head of the Department of General Practice in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, is a driving force in helping Australian women to 'march forward' with their sexual and reproductive health, a core aspect of women's human rights that have been much fought for by generations of women.
The Australian Government’s recent announcement of a $500 million increase for women’s health, including larger rebates for long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARC), was informed by SPHERE’s research and advocacy efforts, including their published studies on the take up of LARCs, and the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) funded ACCORd trial, which saw marked increases in LARC use once GPs were provided with online training to deliver better contraceptive counselling and access to a rapid referral service for LARC insertions.
The funding is a significant forward march since the days of Professor Mazza’s early medical training, where she found women’s health needs to be often ignored, misdiagnosed or mistreated. While at medical school, she undertook an elective with British obstetrician Professor Wendy Savage, who worked and taught in London’s East End. “She’d been removed from her position at the London Hospital because of complaints made by her peers about the sometimes unconventional way she practised. Her female patients, who were mainly Bangladeshi refugee women, marched on the streets in her support, demanding her reinstatement,” Professor Mazza recalled. “I learned so much from her about misogyny in medicine and better ways of delivering women’s health care. Wendy taught me to challenge the status quo when you thought something wasn’t right and to seek out the evidence.”
During a later hospital rotation in psychiatry, Professor Mazza was particularly struck by the gendered nature of the presentations; while men were being admitted mainly with psychosis, the majority of women admitted were depressed. “I couldn’t understand why, and a consultant said to me, ‘Why don’t you take them into your consulting room and ask them?” she said. “So, I did, and they disclosed to me their experience of sexual abuse and domestic violence. I was a medical student at Monash in the 80s, but I hadn’t been taught anything about violence against women, (note, this has now very much changed), so I wasn’t prepared for it at all.”
During her general practice rotation in western Victoria, Professor Mazza was one of the few female doctors practising in the region. She noticed that large numbers of women came to her seeking repeat prescriptions of Serapax, a commonly prescribed benzodiazepine with a sedative effect that was used at the time to treat anxiety. “Yet, they were telling me all about the domestic violence being perpetrated against them,” she said. “It appeared that women were using these drugs to help them cope with the abusive marriages they couldn’t escape. So, I got very interested in the gender dynamics of women’s health, and how poorly addressed issues like violence were within the healthcare system.”
This curiosity led her to complete a clinical doctorate, where she undertook the first-ever study in Australia to investigate the prevalence of violence against women attending general practice. The results, published in the Medical Journal of Australia were grim, finding high levels of violence that women were rarely talking about with their doctors.
These foundational experiences led to Professor Mazza becoming one of Australia’s leading women’s health experts and advocates, including her current appointments to the Victorian Women’s Health Advisory Council and the National Women’s Health Advisory Council, where she chairs or co-chairs subcommittees focused on women’s access to essential health care such as contraception and abortion. She’s learned that bringing about policy change to improve the lives of women and girls is very much a group effort, and requires bringing tangible solutions to the table based on evidence. “Our SPHERE coalition includes clinicians, consumers and people from across the non-government sector, who come together and provide a multidisciplinary perspective to solving very complex problems involving economics, models of care, workforce capacity, regulatory issues, legislative issues and health literacy,” she said. “We bring diverse perspectives, discuss the evidence and develop consensus on how to progress. We build relationships with key decision-makers and then propose solutions. There’s no point publishing your research in an obscure journal and just hoping it will help.”
A world where our health system is responsive to women’s needs and is equitable, accessible and affordable is the progress Professor Mazza hopes to see on International Women’s Day in 2025 and in the years ahead. In the meantime, she’s proud of the work of the many staff and students who work alongside her. “If I’ve mentored and nurtured the next generation of women’s health researchers, I’ll know I’ve done a good job.”
Professor Danielle Mazza is part of the Monash Women’s Health Alliance. Follow the Monash Women’s Health Alliance on LinkedIn, Instagram and their website to stay in touch with our women’s health research and impact.
About Monash University
Monash University is Australia’s largest university with more than 80,000 students. In the 60 years since its foundation, it has developed a reputation for world-leading high-impact research, quality teaching, and inspiring innovation.
With four campuses in Australia and a presence in Malaysia, China, India, Indonesia and Italy, it is one of the most internationalised Australian universities.
As a leading international medical research university with the largest medical faculty in Australia and integration with leading Australian teaching hospitals, we consistently rank in the top 50 universities worldwide for clinical, pre-clinical and health sciences.
For more news, visit Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences or Monash University.
MEDIA ENQUIRIES