Women drive the majority of all healthcare spending, make up half of the global population, and are expected to control $34 trillion in US wealth by 2030. Historically, the industry intended to serve them has allocated only 1 to 4% of its research budget to female-specific conditions. Here is what this contradiction actually means.
Women are the most influential healthcare consumers in the world. They make about 80% of all household healthcare decisions. They spend more out-of-pocket on health than men. They utilize medical services more frequently. And by 2030, they are projected to control the majority of private wealth in the US.
They are the primary buyers, the primary users, and the primary decision-makers in the largest industry in the world. And the healthcare system that they fund with their spending has consistently relegated their health to a peripheral issue.
This is not a matter of representation or perspective. It is a documented structural discrepancy between who the healthcare market serves and who it was designed around. The consequences manifest in underfunded research, inadequately treated conditions, dismissed symptoms, and products developed for male biology and sold to female customers without science to support the sale.
Women drive 80% of healthcare spending and have historically received 1 to 4% of research investment focused on their specific biology. These numbers do not add up. And they never should.
The figures that make the contradiction undeniable
A 2021 McKinsey analysis found that only 1% of global investment in healthcare research and innovation was allocated to female-specific conditions outside of oncology. Another analysis found that, in total, only 2% of healthcare research and development is dedicated to female-specific conditions.
In 2024, the World Economic Forum and the McKinsey Health Institute estimated that closing the women’s health gap could add over one trillion dollars annually to the global economy by 2040. That is the economic value currently being left on the table because conditions that specifically affect women are not sufficiently researched and treated.
The venture capital market for women’s health is growing rapidly: between 2020 and 2024, investments more than tripled. Nevertheless, this accounts for only about 2.3% of total venture capital in the healthcare sector.
According to McKinsey analysis, companies focused on erectile dysfunction attracted six times more investment between 2019 and 2023 than companies focused on endometriosis. Endometriosis affects an estimated 190 million women worldwide.
This imbalance does not reflect the medical importance of the two conditions. It reflects which patients the industry was historically built around.
Why women’s pain is taken less seriously
The pattern extends beyond research funding into clinical practice.
Across a multitude of conditions, women report more severe, more frequent, and longer-lasting pain than men. Nevertheless, research shows they are consistently treated less often for it. Their symptoms are more frequently labeled as emotional or psychosomatic.
An analysis of the compensation structure in the US Medicare system found that in over 80% of cases, physician services for male-specific procedures were reimbursed at higher rates than for female-specific ones. On average, the compensation was 28% higher, even though the procedures were no more complex.
The financial structure of the healthcare system thus contains a literal valuation of whose body is more important to treat.
Women are also more frequently dismissed by their doctors. A large-scale survey showed that women who felt heard by their providers had better health outcomes across several metrics. This is partly a finding about the value of good communication. And partly a finding about how expensive it is when women are not listened to. Because the women who felt dismissed had poorer outcomes. This dismissal is not neutral. It has measurable health costs.
In October 2025, the panel discussion on The Diary of a CEO with Dr. Mary Claire Haver, Dr. Vonda Wright, Dr. Stacy Sims, and Dr. Natalie Crawford provided one of the clearest public indictments of this failure ever heard in the media. The doctors described in very concrete terms how women with serious symptoms were told it was stress, anxiety, or simply the price of being a woman.
Wright reported on women who came to her practice after years in which other doctors had dismissed their complaints. They had been told their lab results were normal, while they were experiencing symptoms that were anything but normal.
Haver described the transition into perimenopause as a zone of chaos that most women enter without guidance because medicine has never developed appropriate tools to support them.
Crawford addressed the specific failure of the supplement and nutrition industry. The proteins, recovery products, and performance supplements that dominate the health market were developed and dosed based on research on male athletes and then repositioned for female customers without female-specific research justifying the formula, the dose, or the timing of intake.
Sims has built her entire career on documenting this exact gap in sports and nutritional science. For years, she has shown: women are not small men. Their hormonal cycle fundamentally changes how their bodies respond to nutrition, training, stress, and supplementation throughout the month. And because this was never studied, there were decades of poorer results, which were blamed on women's lack of consistency or lack of discipline.
What happens when the market finally takes women seriously
The research group Women's Health Access Matters (WHAM) has quantified what investments in women's health actually yield.
Research into just four conditions that disproportionately affect women—Alzheimer's, coronary heart disease, lung cancer, and rheumatoid arthritis—generated about $14 billion in economic return from $350 million in investment.
That is a return that the investment industry in the healthcare sector has historically missed out on. Because it didn't look for it. Because women's health was categorized as a niche before anyone crunched the numbers.
In the meantime, the numbers have been crunched. The Gates Foundation has pledged $2.5 billion by 2030, specifically for research areas in women's health that have been underfunded for half a century. The World Economic Forum has founded the Global Alliance for Women's Health with over 120 member organizations. And McKinsey estimates an annual potential of $50 billion for US healthcare systems alone if the gap in preventative care for women is closed.
The economic case no longer needs to be made. It has been made. What is emerging now is the infrastructure to act on it.
The economic case for investment in women's health is clearly proven. What is emerging now is the infrastructure to act on it. This is exactly where we stand.
What this means for the supplements you take
The supplement industry is less regulated than the pharmaceutical industry. Therefore, the research gap that has already shaped drug development is even more pronounced here.
Most formulas on the market were developed from studies on male subjects, often male athletes, and then sold to women without data on dosing, timing, and interactions for female physiology.
Throughout the month, the hormonal cycle changes how women metabolize nutrients, how they respond to stimulants, how they recover from training, and how their bodies react to administered active ingredients. A formula developed without female subjects cannot reflect this. The packaging has been adapted to appeal to women. The science has not followed.
Developing a product for women, rather than marketing a men's product to women, means taking female biology as the basis for development and not as a target audience segment. It means using research on female subjects, considering interactions with the hormonal cycle, and honestly stating what the evidence proves specifically for women and what was merely adopted from male data.
The first human NMN study conducted specifically with women, Yoshino et al. (2021), measured results that are directly relevant to female metabolic health at a certain life stage. This precision is not a marketing decision. It is what it concretely means to take biology seriously.
Women are the most important consumers in healthcare, the most important decision-makers for their families, and the most important financiers of an industry that historically developed around someone else.
That is changing right now. Research is growing, investments are arriving, and the debate has reached a scale where it can no longer be dismissed as a niche topic. The question now is whether the products being offered to women in the meantime are keeping pace with the science or whether they continue to operate on assumptions that were never tested on a female body.
Sources
- McKinsey Health Institute. (2022). Unlocking opportunities in women's healthcare. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare/our-insights/unlocking-opportunities-in-womens-healthcare
- McKinsey Health Institute & World Economic Forum. (2024). Closing the women's health gap: A $1 trillion opportunity. https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/closing-the-womens-health-gap-a-1-trillion-dollar-opportunity-to-improve-lives-and-economies
- McKinsey Health Institute & World Economic Forum. (2025). Blueprint to close the women's health gap. https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/blueprint-to-close-the-womens-health-gap
- Women's Health Access Matters. (2026). The business case for accelerating women's health investment. https://whamnow.org/blog-post/womens-health-is-a-360b-market-heres-the-data-to-prove-it/
- Gates Foundation. (2025). Gates Foundation announces catalytic funding to spark new era of women-centered research. https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ideas/media-center/press-releases/2025/08/womens-health-funding-commitment
- Haver, M. C., Wright, V., Sims, S., & Crawford, N. (2025, October 16). Hormone & fertility experts: We've been lied to about women's health. The Diary of a CEO.
- Criado Perez, C. (2019). Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Penguin Random House.
- Yoshino, M., Yoshino, J., Kayser, B. D., et al. (2021). Nicotinamide mononucleotide increases muscle insulin sensitivity in prediabetic women. Science, 372(6547), 1224–1229. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abe9985