The Economic And Social Consequences Of The Women's Health Gap

Forbes

24-04-2025

Dr. Scott Braunstein is the Chief Medical Officer of Sollis Health.
Women's health has long been underfunded and under-researched. The disparity isn't just a healthcare issue: It's an economic and social crisis.
In 1977, the FDA recommended excluding women of childbearing age from Phase I and early Phase II drug trials—even if they weren't pregnant or trying to become pregnant. While this policy was intended to prevent adverse health outcomes after thalidomide, a morning sickness drug, caused severe birth defects, it resulted in a shortage of data on how medication affects all women. This policy dovetailed into the general exclusion of women from medical research, strengthening gender biases that viewed the white male body as the physiological 'norm.'
In the 1980s, activists protested the CDC's case definition of HIV/AIDS, which was too narrow to include many women with the condition. While the NIH began encouraging the inclusion of women and minorities in drug trials and medical research later that decade, it wasn't until 1993 that Congress codified it in federal law.
In 2025, women's care continues to be affected by lack of funding, delayed treatments and misdiagnoses. Women experiencing a heart attack are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed because their symptoms often differ from men's. Only 4.5% of coronary artery disease research funding is allocated to women, despite cardiovascular disease being the leading cause of death for women. Women are diagnosed later than men for over 700 diseases, including several types of cancer. And while chronic pain is more common in women, they're less likely to receive painkillers and more likely to have physical symptoms dismissed as psychological.
The disparity in women's care goes deeper than health outcomes. The McKinsey Health Institutes reports that globally, the average woman will spend nine years of her life in poor health—25% longer than men. With nearly half of this health burden affecting women during their working years, the healthcare gap can have a profound impact on their ability to financially support themselves and their families. This productivity loss affects the healthcare industry, too, contributing to the global healthcare workforce shortage that, according to the World Health Organization, will see a shortfall of 11 million healthcare workers by 2030.
For any healthcare company concerned about employee retention or patient experience, the other side of the coin is investing in women's health—which is itself a high-potential market. According to McKinsey, investing in women's health shows a positive ROI, with approximately $3 in economic growth projected for every $1 invested.
Closing the women's health gap can benefit patients, industries and even the global economy, to the tune of $1 trillion annually by 2040, according to McKinsey. I believe this will require nothing less than a paradigm shift in medical research and healthcare delivery. But what does that entail?
From my perspective as a chief medical officer, I believe healthcare leaders need to lead the shift toward more personalized, proactive healthcare solutions—particularly in emergency medicine, where an overreliance on urgent cares and ERs has resulted in overcrowding, a rise in misdiagnoses, and stress and confusion caused by long waits and a lack of continuity between providers. Here are several ways you can get involved:
• Support better funding and research for women's health. In the United States, the National Institute of Health (NIH) only allocates 11% of its budget to women's-health-specific research. Private-sector stakeholders have an opportunity to channel funds into high-impact areas of research, enabling more investment and innovation that will reap more data about how women experience disease, react to medication and recover.
• Create financial incentives to close the gender gap. Developing new financial products and investment vehicles can attract capital to projects that directly address the women's health gap. For example, the fast-growing FemTech sector, already disrupting the healthcare market, funds consumer products, digital health applications, and medical products and technologies specifically designed for women's health needs.
• Improve the patient experience. Develop creative business models that provide a better experience for your urgent and emergent care patients, such as concierge medicine, which is currently undergoing explosive growth. This can help remove barriers for women seeking acute care and allow your organization to provide more personalized, accurate care and diagnoses.
If the medical, social and economic costs of treating women's health as a 'specialty' are obvious, the reasons for closing the women's health gap should be even more so. Achieving medical equity and inclusivity for women could not only improve their lives but also their families, their communities and the world in which we all live.
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