January 18, 2024 – Leading organizations across the healthcare value chain have today signed an open letter addressing all players in the healthcare ecosystem, calling for the improvement of gender equity in global healthcare. The letter highlights a long history of inadequate awareness, data, infrastructure, and funding as well as societal and institutional bias leading to worse health outcomes for women across the globe.

Problems throughout the system…

Gender bias can be found in every corner of the healthcare ecosystem. This begins with investment, with, for example, just 3 percent of overall digital health funding made up by women’s health digital start-ups.¹ Similarly, in research and development, despite the fact that, for example, women account for 70 percent of chronic pain patients, 80 percent of pain medication has only been tested on men or male mice.² Education and public awareness around women’s health has also been neglected, with 41 percent of UK medical schools not having mandatory menopause education on the curriculum.³

…lead to poor outcomes for women

The consequences of this imbalance are significant for women, and examples are many and varied. On average:

Women wait four years longer than men to receive a diagnosis for the same disease.⁴
Women are seven times more likely to have a heart condition misdiagnosed.⁵
Women with type 1 diabetes are 44 percent more likely to die from secondary complications than men.⁶
Women are 52 percent more likely than men to experience an adverse reaction to medical drugs.⁷

Time for action

Today’s open letter calls for this emerging cross-sector community to make a lasting commitment to regenerating women’s health—something that makes economic, as well as moral, sense. A report by the World Economic Forum has projected that “investments addressing the women’s health gap could potentially boost the global economy by $1 trillion annually by 2040.” The letter lays out six ways to achieve this by redesigning the healthcare system with women in mind. These are:

Increasing advocacy and awareness around women’s health
Expanding curriculums to adequately cover women’s health topics
Increasing the volume of clinical and policy research trials on women’s health
Building women-centric integrated care pathways
Ensuring gender-specific data sets are collected, regulated, analyzed, used, and shared across the healthcare ecosystem
Boosting funding for academic research, product research and development, and consumer health solutions around women’s health

This isn’t the first time that these issues and solutions have been presented. The causes are complex, varied, and often buried under layers of historical norms and bias. Companies acting alone will certainly have impact, but the step change required will only come from cross-sector collaborations and partnerships. The hope is this open letter movement, bringing together a cross-sector community of representatives from the healthcare industry, education, government, the medical profession, financial investors, and all other parties, will be able to shape a more equitable future for women’s health.

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