2:35
- ABC News
- July 3, 2020
Women in public health facing pushback
"I think people feel freer to denigrate us," one female health director said.
2:35
Emily Brown was let go from her position as the director of the Rio Grande County Public Health Department in Colorado in May. She told Kaiser Health News she was at odds with county commissioners who wanted to loosen coronavirus restrictions faster.
“They finally were tired of me not going along the line they wanted me to go along,” she said, according to Kaiser.
More than two dozen residents of the rural county called her firing during a public health crisis \"shocking and appalling.\" The commissioner chairman said in a local report the move was part of a restructuring \"to better address the crisis.\"
Brown, as well as Quick and Acton, were replaced in the interim by men.
![\"PHOTO:](\"http://a.abcnews.com/images/US/nichole-quick-ap-jc-200701_hpEmbed_13x10_384.jpg\")
Women in leadership roles are often challenged \"from a credibility standpoint, from a trust standpoint,\" Freeman, the NACCHO CEO, said.
Women also are often subjected to social media abuse when they \"step into the public arena,\" Sarah Hawkes, co-director of Global Health 5050, an organization that promotes gender equality and health equity in health care, told ABC News.
Before she was fired, Brown told NPR that she had seen social media comments about her and other female public health officials remark that \"based on what we looked like, we obviously weren't health experts and shouldn't be listened to.\"
During a public hearing on a proposed mask order in Palm Beach County, Florida, last week, one resident threatened to execute a citizen's arrest on Dr. Alina Alonso, the county's health director, for \"crimes against humanity.\" Another questioned the respected health official's credentials. \"I really have many question marks about your degrees and what you really know,\" she said.
In May, reacting to Alameda County lockdown orders that kept his Fremont factory closed, Tesla founder Elon Musk called Pan, the county's health officer, \"ignorant\" in a tweet. She was recently appointed California's state epidemiologist.
Tesla is filing a lawsuit against Alameda County immediately. The unelected & ignorant “Interim Health Officer” of Alameda is acting contrary to the Governor, the President, our Constitutional freedoms & just plain common sense!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 9, 2020
A Pennsylvania official faced backlash for transphobic comments made during a virtual discussion on the township's reopening last month. Scott Township Commissioner Paul Abel said he was \"tired of listening to a guy dressed up like a woman\" -- referring to Pennsylvania's secretary of health, Dr. Rachel Levine, who is transgender. Abel resigned a week later. Levine has not publically commented on the incident.
Toni Van Pelt, president of the National Organization for Women, told ABC News in a statement that misogyny \"prevents people from respecting women in leadership.\" During the pandemic, \"that has meant that policymakers often look to men as scientific experts instead of women,\" she said, pointing to this Undark Magazine report.
\"These women leaders across the United States are trying to do their jobs, making the right call and putting people over profit, but they have misogyny and sexism in their way,\" Van Pelt said. \"When health professionals in the U.S. speak truth to power, especially those who are women, women of color or LGBTQIA+, they aren’t given the respect they deserve.\"
Okanogan County's Jones, for her part, is undeterred.
\"I am not going to back down from this, regardless of any threats,\" she said. \"We'll continue to do our jobs. This isn't a short-term virus.\"
Ferrer said she isn't worried about the threats, but she is concerned about the county's case numbers and hospitalizations. On Monday, Los Angeles became the first county in the country to hit 100,000 cases of COVID-19. Hospitalizations have also increased 27% in the last two weeks, officials said earlier this week.
\"I think the more important thing is, how do you work with people who have very different understandings of their risk, of other people's risk, a different tolerance for what they're willing or not willing to do? How do you get everybody together so that we can actually, successfully slow the spread?\" Ferrer said. \"We have a ton of work in front of us. We need to stay focused on what's important right now.\"
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