Women’s Health

In women’s health, there are three gaps: a funding gap for research, a data gap and a care gap. Closing them is a major opportunity to build better care, better science and lasting businesses - not because every company in the space will succeed, but because important needs remain poorly understood and poorly served. These are the four arguments behind that view.

1. This is not a niche. It is a lifetime of health.

I do not think of women’s health as another name for fertility or pregnancy. It includes those things, but also menstrual health, menopause and conditions such as cardiovascular disease that can affect women differently. The opportunity is much larger when we stop defining it only by reproduction.

Menopause makes this especially clear: it is not a disease, but the transition can affect daily life, and changes in bone and cardiovascular health matter long afterwards. I see an opportunity to build care around women’s lives, rather than treat each stage as an isolated episode.

Sources: WHO: Menopause; McKinsey Health Institute and World Economic Forum: Closing the women’s health gap (2024).

2. The gaps in the science leave room for discovery.

We still lack good data on how conditions affect women and how well treatments work for them. The US law requiring women’s inclusion in NIH-funded clinical research dates to 1993. That did not mean women had never been studied before, and inclusion alone does not guarantee that results are analysed by sex.

Research funding tells the same story. A National Academies analysis found that women’s-health research made up 7.9% of NIH research-grant funding in 2023, down from 9.7% in 2013. In the UK, reproductive health and childbirth received just 2.4% of health-research funding in 2022.

I see those gaps as an argument for doing the work: better research, better diagnostics and treatments designed around evidence that includes women. Neglect does not make discovery easy. But it means there are important questions we have not answered well enough.

Sources: NIH: Policy on the inclusion of women and minorities in clinical research; McKinsey: Closing the data gaps in women’s health (2023); National Academies: women’s health research at NIH; UK Health Research Analysis 2022.

3. We do not need to wait for a breakthrough to improve care.

Some progress depends on new science. Some depends on delivering the care we already know how to provide. WHO reports that endometriosis diagnosis takes an average of four to twelve years. Better recognition, referral and access to appropriate care matter even before we have a cure.

This is why I see opportunity in care delivery as well as biotech: trained clinicians, coordinated services and follow-up that does not leave women managing the gaps themselves. The test is not whether a service calls itself women’s health. It is whether it improves care and can show that it does.

Sources: WHO: Endometriosis; McKinsey Health Institute: Care for women (2026).

4. Better health creates value beyond healthcare.

The first reason to improve women’s health is that women deserve better health. But the effects extend to work, income and participation in everyday life. The McKinsey Health Institute and World Economic Forum estimate that closing the women’s health gap could add at least $1 trillion to the global economy annually by 2040.

That is a modelled economic benefit, not a forecast of company revenues or investment returns. I take it as evidence that the cost of poor health reaches well beyond the clinic. The opportunity is to turn that wider value into services and treatments that women can actually access, with business models that can sustain them.

Source: McKinsey Health Institute and World Economic Forum: Closing the women’s health gap (2024).

Reading list

Articles and reports on women’s health that I keep coming back to.

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