Баронесса Салли Дэвис: путь от борьбы с гендерным неравенством в медицине до модернизации Кембриджского университета

By Beckie Smith 09 Sep 2026 beckie__smith When Dame Sally Davies was a medical student, she remembers, there was a “very unbalanced” gender split among her classmates – with women making up only 13 of the 110 students. “There are not enough women professors. There's a real issue in surgery and women kind of group in certain areas,” she says. This is a trend that Davies, an expert in sickle-cell disease, has noticed throughout her medical career. Academic medicine, she notes, “is still very unbalanced”. By 1985, she was a consultant haematologist at the Central Middlesex Hospital in Brent, London, which was later incorporated into Imperial College London. In 1997, she became professor of haemoglobinopathies – a group of genetic blood disorders that affect the structure or production of haemoglobin in red blood cells. Her move into public service came in the mid-90s, when she describes being “dragged, gradually drawn, into the R&D funding world” – beginning when she was asked, as a consultant, to sit on a committee that gave out regional research funding. In the mid-1990s, Davies was seconded from her hospital into a regional health authority as an R&D director. She says she gave “a long list of conditions” on which she would take the job, including that she be allowed to continue clinical work and funding for the hospital “so my patients in the hospital wouldn't lose out”. However, she failed to negotiate a pay rise up front, and asked to be sent on a negotiating course. “I realised I wasn't bad – women are supposed not to be good at negotiating about themselves and everything – but I could be better,” she said. “Every time there was a reorganisation, I was given the bigger job,” Davies says of her time in the regional health authority. Then in 2004, she was seconded to the Department of Health, where she was director general of research and development and chief scientific adviser. “I've been in far too many rooms where there were very few women – and I think the civil service is much better than academia, but we've still got some way to go” As a DG, Davies set up and became the inaugural director of the National Institute for Health Research, the government’s major funder of clinical, public health, social care and translational research, which she says “changed clinical research and doctors’ careers across the country dramatically”. In this role she worked with Russell Hamilton, DH’s director of research and development, in a dynamic she describes as a “partnership” rather than a “boss and a deputy” relationship. She also chaired the strategy board for the NIHR, which had a budget of £1.7bn in 2025-26 and which aims to “improve the health and wealth of the nation through research”. While working at DH, Davies started introducing herself as a civil servant rather than as a doctor after finding most civil servants she worked with to be “very bright, thoughtful, hard working” and “because I was proud to be a civil servant, and I wanted to show that pride”. Davies “formally” became a civil servant in 2010, when she was appointed chief medical officer – first on an interim basis before taking on the role permanently in 2011 – a permanent secretary-level role she held until 2019. She says working in regional health bodies prepared her for the civil service because “in the NHS world, we weren't doing performance management, we weren't thinking about people development in a formal way, nor was I used to programme management. So there were all sorts of things that the civil service was generally getting better and better at that I started to learn in the regional health authority and then in the civil service”. She also undertook training during those years, including an executive course on emotional intelligence and leadership at the European business school INSEAD after recognising, after a year as regional health director, “The skills that got me here are not the skills I need in this job.” She describes that course – as well as time she spent working with an executive coach – as “career changing and life changing” because they helped her use the skills and strengths she already had effectively. “The top of management is always about people, it turns out… the negotiation and the emotional intelligence, along with some good ideas and a bit of leadership, are what makes for success.” Davies says she had a “gilded career in the civil service”, having arrived as a technical expert at director general level before later becoming a perm sec. But there were times when colleagues did not take her seriously because she was a woman – mainly among the senior academics who had moved into the civil service. “I've been in far too many rooms where there were very few women – and I think the civil service is much better than academia, but we've still got some way to go,” she says. In particular, she says she often saw women talked over in meetings, or people responding more positively when a man repeated a point that had been made earlier by a woman but ignored. “As a chair, I try and listen to the women actively,” she says. Her leadership style evolved over her time as CMO. “I didn't always get it right, but I did try and listen and then give the time to it,” she says. She recalls someone telling her that people didn’t think she listened to them – and that despite initially dismissing the comment, she came to understand she needed to become an active listener. “So I did adapt my style, or try to…. No one in medicine ever gave me that sort of feedback,” she says. “I am pretty resilient and I'll take anyone on if I think it's the right thing to do – but I've had to learn that.” One downside of Davies’s time as chief medical officer was how she was portrayed in the press. One of the “most painful” stereotypes she had to deal with was being referred to as “the nation’s nanny”. “I hated that and, actually, I lashed out on the last morning on the Today programme about that, to Nick Robinson… I said, ‘That's sexist, and I've had enough of it,’” she says. Besides that, the former CMO says, “plenty of men found me very difficult because I was in their face, and I'm competitive to deliver what I think is the right thing to deliver. I’m quite tough.” Most of Davies’s mentors throughout her career have been men. “I don't think these things should be gendered. Behaviours and approaches and thinking comes from all sides, and I'll take it from wherever I can get it,” she says. But she says Dame Jane Cummings, who was chief nursing officer when Davies was CMO, “taught me lots”. As chief medical officer, Davies became known as a figurehead in the fight against antimicrobial resistance – the rise of antibiotic-resistant superbugs. She led the development of the government’s 2015 AMR strategy, which aimed to slow and contain the spread of AMR in people, animals, agriculture and the wider environment – which led to a 7% cut in the use of antibiotics in healthcare and a 40% reduction in farming. “I never thought that we would reduce so quickly and voluntarily the use of antibiotics in our animal husbandry,” she told CSW in 2019. Davies has continued her fight against AMR as UK special envoy on antimicrobial resistance, a role in which she represents the UK government internationally and advises ministers on the issue. She is also a member of the United Nations Interagency Coordination Group on Antimicrobial Resistance and the Global Leaders Group on Antimicrobial Resistance. Asked which behaviours and values are rewarded in civil service leadership, Davies says “resilience pays off” in both government and academia. “When I started my career, it was all about type-A personalities and heroic leadership and all of that,” she says, but she later “learned the wisdom of crowds and how if we talk things through, it’s always going to be better than if I did it on my own”. She says there is “more of a hierarchy” in medicine than in government: “[The civil service] looks to be a hierarchy but in practice, it's much more fluid than the visible hierarchy, the power structures and the ‘getting things done’ structures.” She says she learned the value of learning how to build trust with ministers and their teams so they would listen to her. She says her approach is about “sticking to your moral code but thinking about what [ministers] are trying to do” – and not continuing to push ideas that ministers aren’t keen on “because it's a waste of time and frustrating”. “There were some men who weren't good at working with women, but the majority just got on with it because I was visibly competent, clearly listened to by ministers,” she says. “I think in the civil service, even the scientists and medics, they're pretty pragmatic. They are there to improve the nation.” “I am pretty resilient, and I'll take anyone on if I think it's the right thing to do – but I've had to learn that” After leaving the civil service, Davies was appointed Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in the 2020 New Year Honours, in which she was described as a “role model for women leaders in science, medicine, and the civil service”. She had already been appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2009 for services to medicine. In the fourth and current “phase” of Davies’s career – after her work on sickle-cell disease, setting up the NIHR and as CMO – she became master of the University of Cambridge’s Trinity College. She describes the job as “taking a centuries-old institution and modernising it without the fellowship even noticing”. “Any committee with money in it, we've got external people. We're much more transparent about all the decisions and what needs doing and involving the fellowship, so that we are actually getting decisions that stick,” she says. Despite her achievements, Davies says she experienced imposter syndrome “at every stage” of her career, including in her ongoing role. “Now I look back and I was the best person at each stage – and I'm really pretty successful,” she says. "And I make change happen. Sometimes I shake it a bit hard, but there you go. I make change happen. So why did I spend so much time and anxiety on imposter syndrome?” Read more profiles of Trailblazing Women here Read the most recent articles written by Beckie Smith - DWP teams take home award for work to improve poverty and incomes stats