Marsha Henderson: “You have to continue to push for what you think is the right thing for public health.”

Preserving an oral history by the former FDA associate commissioner of women’s heath

When Marsha B. Henderson, former FDA Associate Commissioner of Women’s Health (1998-2019), sat down for an oral history interview upon her retirement from the agency, she could not have foreseen becoming party to a government digital purge 7 years later.

Over the past week, the Trump administration has been busy at work deleting government webpages containing a list of banned words that include “diverse”, “gender”, and “women,” The Washington Post reported. One of those pages was an archive of FDA oral histories, with 302 records—including Henderson’s.

It is the mission of the Cancer History Project to find and preserve archives that would otherwise be lost. It is also Black History Month. In an effort to remove this important document from the history of FDA, the Trump administration has instead shone a spotlight on Henderon’s work on health equity during her tenure in the FDA Office of Women’s Health.

Read more in The Cancer Letter.

Oral History Abstract: Marsha B. Henderson, MCRP joined the FDA Office of Women’s Health (OWH) in 1998 as a deputy director. She spearheaded various communication strategies to engage stakeholders, improve women’s health literacy and promote awareness of pioneering research on sex as a biological variable funded by the OWH. She was appointed Associate Commissioner for Women’s Health in 2011 (after acting in that position for a year), bringing a new strategic vision to OWH with the creation of the office’s first Research Road Map.

Keywords: Women’s health; stakeholder engagement; sex as a biological variable; heart disease; clinical trials; mammography; contraception