How did Joan Reede, Harvard Medical School’s head of diversity, decide to pursue a medical career? Credit television. As a young girl, Reede says she was interested in nursing. Her aunt was a nurse and she thought nursing was a woman’s job. But while in junior high, she stumbled upon the popular 1960s TV medical drama Ben Casey. The experiences of the neurosurgeon title character changed her mind.
“Doctors are in charge, I decided I should be in charge,” she recalls thinking. “So in seventh grade I decided to be a doctor. It never occurred to me that they were men, it never occurred to me that they were white.”
Reede became a pediatrician, and worked for years for Boston Public Schools before joining Harvard in 1990. She is now the dean for diversity and community partnership at Harvard Medical School, where her work includes finding ways to improve the school’s retention of minority students and faculty, and connecting the medical school to the broader community. She has created more than 20 programs to support women and minorities at the medical school. For that work, Reede was one of the winners of Xconomy’s 2017 Commitment to Diversity Award. The other diversity award winners this year were Cambridge, MA-based Biogen (NASDAQ: [[ticker:BIIB]]), and Women in Bio, a national nonprofit promoting careers and leadership for women in the life sciences.
As a African-American woman, Reede says awareness of issues of equity and social justice was part of life. She grew up in the Boston area, and remembers visiting family in the South, where she witnessed segregation firsthand. Her family always emphasized education, which Reede took to heart. She tutored fellow students in high school. In college, she tutored in prisons. And during medical school, Reede spent her Saturdays helping high school students with their microbiology work.
Reede says she was driven to those tutoring roles to try to provide for others the opportunities that she herself was given. Reede’s mother graduated college the same year she graduated from medical school. Her grandmother only finished middle school, and her great-grandmother was a slave. Reede says that it was the legacy of these and many other individuals that helped her become a physician.
While working for the Boston public school system, Reede noticed how difficult it was for students and even staff to find resources, and she tried to bridge those gaps. For example, Reede recalls a child expressing an interest in law. She scrolled through her Rolodex to find an attorney she knew who would be willing to talk.
Reede is still helping to make connections, but now she’s trying to build them between Harvard Medical School and the broader community. One of the programs she created at Harvard, the Commonwealth Fund Mongan Fellowship in Minority Policy, prepares physicians to improve healthcare access for minorities and others who face challenges accessing care. Monica Bharel, Massachusetts’ commissioner of public health, is an alumnus of the program.
Within Harvard, Reede says there’s still much to do. While there is a growing understanding about the importance of diversity, Reede notes that there is not a lot of information about which diversity-promoting activities work and which don’t. The physician in her wants to collect and analyze diversity data in order to make evidence-based decisions.
“People think it’s just about race or ethnicity, or just about gender,” Reede says. “But diversity is about all of us. It’s about how all of us can contribute to the mission of our organization.”
Boardroom Bound
Biogen is working to improve diversity on multiple fronts. Three years ago, the company launched its Women’s Leadership Program, which is offered in partnership with Babson College. Minita Shah-Mara, Biogen’s director of global inclusion, says the executive training program helps advance the careers of women working at Biogen by teaching them skills such as negotiation, teamwork, and leadership. The company also offers employee groups oriented around cultural awareness; veterans; women; disabilities; and employees who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning.
Inclusion is a hallmark of all of these groups, Shah-Mara says. The company’s Women Innovations Network, for example, has more than 1,200 members—men and women—at Biogen locations worldwide. To expand its reach, the group also connects with women’s professional organizations that are relevant to the life sciences industry.
But what might have been Biogen’s best known diversity program was
