Professor Robyn Norton AO knows exactly where her genius lies - and leans into it without hesitation.

For her, that space is where evidence meets impact – grounded in the conviction that science, done well, should improve lives at scale.

Robyn and I met for coffee in May 2023 at Campos in Newtown – a narrow Sydney terrace with oak floorboards, a sharp espresso, and bleary-eyed hospital staff winding down the night shift. I had just begun shaping the idea for On Theory. Robyn leaned in, asked incisive questions, and saw it immediately: what it could be, who it might reach, why it mattered. 

That same clarity runs through her career. As co-founder of The George Institute for Global Health, Robyn helped build one of the world’s most influential health research organisations with over 400 active projects in 60 countries and $40 million raised in the last year alone. But the numbers are only part of the story. She built not just infrastructure, but momentum: championing researchers who didn’t fit the mould (I am one of them), supporting ideas ahead of their time, and interpreting resistance as a sign that institutions - not visions - needed to adapt.

She turned down formal politics, choosing instead to work across systems - moving between disciplines, sectors and institutions with an understated command. At the core of her work is a deep respect for evidence – not just as a method, but as a discipline of discernment. “We can all have opinions, but we can’t all bring that scientific rigour and methodology,” she says. Her instinct is to act on what we know, to identify where data is missing, and to treat that absence not as a barrier but as an urgent invitation to learn.

After stepping down from executive leadership at the Institute, Robyn remains closely involved – continuing to co-lead work in Australia and the UK to increase the inclusion of women in medical research, and to ensure data is disaggregated by sex and gender. This work laid the foundations for the establishment of Australia’s first Centre for Sex and Gender Equity in Health and Medicine in 2024 – a partnership with the University of New South Wales’ (UNSW) Australian Human Rights Institute and Deakin University. As Chair of the Executive Governance Committee, Robyn is helping rewire the research landscape: convening governments, funders, publishers, and communities to build systems that see everyone from the start – not as an afterthought.

This conversation traces how she’s done it: how she reads power, navigates institutional friction, and seeds change by backing people over declarations. If leadership is about what you build and who you bring with you, Robyn’s story offers a blueprint worth studying.

Building a Centre that changes the system, not just the conversation

When Robyn and her colleagues launched the Centre for Sex and Gender Equity (hereafter the Centre), it wasn’t just to fill a research gap. It was to confront a systemic flaw baked into the foundations of modern medicine – one that has long treated cis male bodies as the standard, and sidelined the symptoms, needs, and risks faced by everyone else.

Building the blueprint for inclusive research

“The problem,” she explains, “was the underrepresentation of women and gender-diverse populations in research.” Without disaggregated data, scientists miss how diseases manifest differently – or disproportionately – across sexes and genders. Diagnostics fail. Treatments fall short. Health outcomes suffer. “If we want to do good science,” she says, “if we want to improve people’s health, then we need to understand their issues and what our research needs to look like for them.”

Her argument for inclusion is also empirical. “If we include women, if we do sex-disaggregated data analyses, we have the potential to improve men’s lives as well as those of gender-diverse people,” she explains. This is about better science. When data is disaggregated, researchers can uncover patterns that are otherwise obscured – leading to more precise diagnoses, treatments that account for variation, and health systems that serve everyone more effectively, including men.

“If we include women, if we do sex-disaggregated data analyses, we have the potential to improve men’s lives as well as those of gender-diverse people.”

What's missing in evidence is mirrored in what's missing in care. I recall an example reported in The Guardian feature about the Centre: a 36-year-old woman, Jen O’Neill, who was not initially treated as an emergency case despite showing signs of a heart attack. Eleven months postpartum, with no traditional risk factors, she was eventually diagnosed with spontaneous coronary artery dissection – a condition that overwhelmingly affects women, often after childbirth. But in the absence of sex-specific research, she was given standard treatment developed for male patients, leading to severe side effects and, ultimately, two more heart attacks.

The Centre was built to change how systems think. That meant embedding sex and gender across institutions and building momentum through coalition. “We’d come across people doing this work, but operating in isolation,” Robyn reflects. “They felt like they were fighting a battle by themselves. The Centre meant creating a community.”

“We’d come across people doing this work, but operating in isolation. They felt like they were fighting a battle by themselves."

But systems change doesn’t happen in a vacuum. From the start, the Centre has worked across government agencies, medical schools, publishers, and industry – sectors that don’t often see themselves as part of the same ecosystem.

Each actor, she argues, plays a distinct role in sustaining or shifting the system. Researchers generate the knowledge, but they also need frameworks that mandate inclusive study design. Journals set the bar for what counts as rigorous science, and can require sex-disaggregated data and gender analysis as a condition for publication. Funders shape incentives by supporting proposals that centre equity. Universities train the next generation and can embed these principles in curricula. Governments set the policy and direction and create accountability for inclusive research. Community organisations ensure lived experience informs what’s studied in the first place.

The Centre was designed to bring these actors together – not to demand consensus, but to create coherence. “Sometimes it’s just finding the right people at the right time. Some of them went into the process with trepidation,” she says of the Centre’s cross-sector collaborations. “But time gave people a real ease. Now, policymakers feel confident because they’ve been part of the discussion – not all of them, but many of the key players.”

In Australia, the Centre is now leading national efforts to map where and how sex and gender are considered across health research, education and policy – laying the groundwork for systemic change. In the UK, a similar initiative - MESSAGE (the Medical Science Sex and Genger Equity project) -convened government agencies, researchers, publishers, and funders to embed sex and gender considerations into every stage of the research cycle, with parallel work planned in race and ethnicity.

Robyn’s approach is driven by a long-term view: that real equity requires not only better research, but restructured relationships between science and policy – on which people’s lives depend.