It's a statistical reality that is as startling as it is overlooked: Of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent worldwide on medical research, less than 1% goes to women's health after 40.
This is despite women making up 51% of the population and making 80% of all healthcare decisions.
When we talk about "science," we often refer to a system that treats half of humanity as a niche market, making women in midlife and beyond virtually invisible.
The Fallacy of the Niche
For decades, medicine assumed the male body was the "universal standard." Women were excluded from most clinical drug trials until 1993. Researchers often justified this by claiming female hormonal fluctuations were too "complex" to study.
This neglect has created a massive knowledge gap. And the older women get, the wider it becomes.
In academia, this is reflected in the so-called scissor graph: women are often in the majority in undergraduate studies. But as one progresses towards leadership positions and professorships, their proportion sharply declines.
And without women at the top of the research hierarchy, securing and directing funding, the very diseases that affect aging women remain unaddressed.
The Silence Around Menopause
This imbalance is most evident in menopause research. For pregnancy, undoubtedly an important health topic, there are over 1.2 million published articles. For menopause, there are fewer than 99,000. For perimenopause, just 8,000.
This lack of data has devastating real-world consequences:
The cliché of the ailing woman. For years, women over 40 with vague complaints like fatigue, brain fog, or decreased libido were dismissed by doctors. Instead of a proper diagnosis, they were advised to have a glass of wine or go out more.
A mental health crisis. The highest suicide risk is among women aged 45 to 55, a timeframe that precisely coincides with the hormonal chaos of perimenopause.
Chronic diseases. Women live on average six years longer than men. But they spend 20% more of their lives in poor health with chronic diseases or psychological burdens, which science has simply not bothered to address.
The Price of Designing for Men
Ignoring women over 40 also means ignoring their specific physical characteristics.
One example is heart attack, the leading cause of death in women. It manifests differently in the female body than in the "classic" male patterns taught in medical school. Because women's symptoms are classified as "atypical," they are more frequently discharged from the emergency room without life-saving treatment.
The same pattern runs through everyday life: from seat belts to office temperatures to football boots, much is designed for the "default male." Older women therefore face a higher risk of injuries and discomfort.
A New Field: Proactive Longevity for Women
With growing awareness of this gap, a new wave of longevity research is emerging. It finally asks how to support the female body during the aging process, rather than treating it as a failing machine.
Interest is growing in products that specifically support cell health and metabolism in women during the hormonal transition phases from age 40.
One example is NMN (Nicotinamide Mononucleotide). It is increasingly becoming a focus in the longevity discussion because it can support NAD⁺ levels. And NAD⁺ is crucial for energy supply and DNA repair in the aging body.
By addressing such cellular causes, women are finally finding tools to regain their vitality in a system that long told them to simply be quiet.
Conclusion
Investing in women over 40 is not an act of charity. It is a prerequisite for modern, precise science.
We cannot continue to spend 99% of our resources on issues that ignore the later years of the majority of the population.
It's time to replace the "default male" as the standard and build a science that takes women's health seriously across the entire lifespan. So that the 50% who hold the world together are no longer overlooked by the very research that should protect them.