What If Your Medicine Was Never Tested On Someone Like You

Only 7% of research funding is dedicated to health issues that affect women exclusively. This underinvestment contributes to a significant health gap: women spend 25% more of their lives in poor health compared to men. Furthermore, women—especially those of color and those who are pregnant, lactating, or post-menopausal—remain underrepresented in key medical research fields like cardiology and oncology.

Only a third of participants in early-phase clinical trials are women, and a mere 5% of drugs in Europe are approved for use during or around pregnancy. This results in millions of women making health decisions without adequate, evidence-based support.

A new white paper by the World Economic Forum’s Global Alliance for Women’s Health outlines five crucial steps for policy-makers: incentivizing innovation in women's health research, increasing female inclusion in clinical trials, improving how sex-specific data is reported, designing trials that consider sex-based biological differences, and updating medical guidelines and drug labels to reflect these differences.

These reforms could not only improve women's health outcomes globally but also add around $1 trillion to global GDP annually by 2040.