The first-time CEO says her own sponsors took chances on her—and that industry leaders need to do the same to rebuild momentum for gender equity.
Jazz CEO Renee Gala has conviction in where her company is going. The cancer and neuroscience drugmaker just recorded its highest-ever total quarterly revenue, growing 16% year-over-year to $1.2 billion.
But when the conversation turns to gender equity in biopharma leadership, she knows there’s still work to be done.
“We have lost some momentum,” Gala told BioSpace earlier this month. “It’s a bit of a vicious cycle, really, because if you don’t have women on boards, then there is less momentum to pull women into C-suites. And if you don’t have women on C-suites, who are your candidates to put in the boardroom?”
And that burden cannot just be on women to lift each other up. Gala called on men to not only support the women around them in their immediate work, but also to be curious about different leadership styles when networking.
“Women progress more slowly from the very first opportunity they’re up for promotion—and that’s a problem,” Gala said, noting that the stall isn’t because there aren’t enough ambitious or qualified women.
To help close the gender representation gap in leadership, men in biopharma must be “more willing to take chances and sponsor people that look less like them—that may have a different leadership style,” Gala continued. “It’s getting out of your comfort zone, but it’s necessary.”
“We should all be inquisitive about asking each other questions to learn,” Gala added. “It is incumbent on all of us to focus not just on ensuring that we have appropriate representation from women, but diversity in general.”
Finding your sponsors
Sponsorship is when a leader uses their position and experience to actively promote and support others’ careers, and it creates real opportunities, Gala said. A mentor, on the other hand, more simply provides advice.
“The reality is that the CEO journey starts many years before an actual search begins,” Gala added. “If you’re not receiving the opportunities to learn and the right exposure assignments and ability to have impact earlier on in your career, it makes that journey to CEO much more challenging.”
For Gala, who has 25 years of industry experience under her belt, many of her own sponsors were men who were willing to take a chance on her.
“They were men that understood what was important to me in terms of balancing my career and having a family,” she said.
But Gala also had to be willing to stand up for herself and seek the right opportunities at the right time. “I had a lot of people throughout my career that were willing to teach. I was also willing to ask, and I think that makes a big difference,” she said.
One moment in her career that stands out is when she was interviewing with Theravance Biopharma’s then-CFO Mike Aguiar. At the time, Gala had been working on M&A deals at Eli Lilly—a job she loved. But she also had one-year-old triplets at home and couldn’t fit in the travel required for due diligence.
“I told him, ‘I will work really hard for you, but at this point in my career, what I need is to have flexibility. I am not interested in traveling, but I’m really interested in having a robust, rewarding career,’” she recalled.
Gala got the job. Both Aguiar and Theravance’s then-CEO Rick Winningham not only understood what Gala had told them—they respected it.
“They gave me incredibly challenging assignments and opportunities to learn, and they knew that having the opportunity to participate in things that my kids were experiencing was very important to me,” Gala said.
Gala spent nearly 13 years at Theravance, rising in the ranks from directing financial planning and analysis to the CFO role. In 2019, Gala joined Jazz as CFO, becoming the biopharma’s president and chief operating officer at the end of 2023, and ultimately taking the reins as CEO in August 2025.
“I never saw myself necessarily as having a CEO path, but I’ve always wanted in my career to be able to have an impact,” Gala said. “Once I started working in pharma and biotech and started to feel that deep underlying purpose, I caught the bug, so to speak—I was hooked on our industry.”
Be curious
Under Gala’s leadership, Jazz has experienced record-setting commercial performance and recently paid out $820 million to acquire Actio Biosciences for its epilepsy programs with high unmet need—and Gala expects more activity to come. Yet despite that success, Gala said she still notices gender-based differences in how her peers interact with her.
“In my first year as CEO, I have attended some CEO retreats and conferences that have been fabulous,” she said. “But what I found really interesting is I’ve had fewer questions from my male colleagues at some of these conferences around ‘What are some of the changes that you’ve made?’ or ‘What have you done to drive strong performance at the company in your first year as CEO?’
“Whereas I would say I get that question from almost all of my female counterparts that I’ve engaged with,” she added. “If we really want more diversity, more women in leadership, we need to ensure that we’re asking the right questions and understanding what is leading to success.”
In a time when urgency for gender equity and representation seems to have waned, the Jazz CEO credits the Biotech CEO Sisterhood and its new C-Suite groups for bolstering these efforts.
“We now see a CFO sisterhood, a CMO sisterhood,” Gala said. “There’s so much momentum here and support. I’m just incredibly grateful to be a part of that community.”
Editor’s note: This is the third installment of BioSpace‘s series featuring first-time women CEOs. Click to read the first and second installments here.
