Sarah Rowlands
Marketing Director, Kisaco Research
Equitable women’s healthcare requires policymaking before and beyond individual health events. Studies show serious investment in women’s health enables innovations that save lives.
In the eight years since the founding of Women’s Health Innovation Summit, women’s healthcare — long relegated to the margins of medical research and health policy — has begun a measurable shift toward greater recognition, investment, and systemic integration.
Historically, women’s health research has been underfunded and narrower in scope than epidemiology would suggest. As recently as 2020, only about 5% of global research and development funding was dedicated to women’s health, with roughly 4% focused on women’s cancers and just 1% addressing other female-specific conditions such as endometriosis, menopause and PCOS, according to a 2024 Nature study. This imbalance entrenched gaps in understanding and treating conditions that disproportionately or uniquely affect women across the lifespan.
Investing in women’s health
Momentum is now building toward closing those gaps. Policymakers and institutional funders have increasingly acknowledged the gender health gap — the reality that women spend more of their lives in poor health and face delayed diagnoses compared with men. A 2024 World Economic Forum (WEF) study also found that women can spend up to 20% more of their lives in ill health, equating to millions of years lost annually to disability and premature mortality. Framing women’s health not only as a moral imperative but also as an economic opportunity has helped catalyze broader support. The same WEF study determined closing the gender health gap could add an estimated $1 trillion annually to the global economy by 2040.
Investment trends reflect this growing recognition. While women’s health still represents a minority share of total healthcare funding, capital flowing into the category has increased substantially. Industry analysts suggest that global venture investment in women’s health grew by more than 200% from 2017 into the early 2020’s, outpacing several other healthcare subsectors from a smaller base. Notably, during periods of broader digital health and life sciences funding contraction, women’s health investment showed relative resilience, posting low double-digit year-over-year growth when broader health tech funding declined.
Philanthropic commitments have reinforced this momentum. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pledged $2.5 billion by 2030 to women’s health R&D, targeting under-researched areas such as preeclampsia, menopause, and gestational diabetes — an approximate 33% increase over recent spending levels. Melinda French Gates has also awarded $250 million in grants to more than 80 organizations focused on women’s health worldwide, expanding support and enabling community-based care innovations.
Normalizing and formalizing healthcare
Importantly, capital is spreading across a wider set of disease areas. Beyond fertility and pregnancy, funding has increasingly targeted areas including menopause care, cardiovascular disease in women, autoimmune conditions, mental health, and chronic pain — conditions that collectively account for a large share of women’s lifetime disease burden. This diversification reflects a growing consensus that focusing narrowly on maternal health fails to address the reality that most healthcare utilization occurs outside of pregnancy.
Payers and employers have reinforced this shift. Menopause has moved from an informal workplace conversation to a formalized care pathway in some health plans, signalling willingness to cover women’s health needs across midlife and beyond. Insurers are beginning to frame women’s health as a cost, outcome, and workforce participation issue rather than a peripheral benefit.
While challenges remain, rising investment and broader engagement are providing the basis of more equitable and effective healthcare for women worldwide.
