When we think about global health, we might not specifically think about women’s health, but women spend 25% more time with significant health issues than men. This time adds up to approximately nine years over a lifetime – nine years! The term Disability Adjusted Life Years, or DALYs, represents the loss of one year of full health. This means collectively women have lost 75 million DALYs, or years of full health. That’s astounding. Why is this?

A major part of it comes from a lack of effective health interventions designed specifically for women. For instance, only 4% of pharmaceutical R&D spending goes to female-specific conditions versus approximately 75% of National Institutes of Health funding that goes to a disease affecting one gender goes to male diseases. Too add to the issue, 75% of clinical trial participants are men.

Economically, the benefits of closing this health gap are immense. For every dollar spent, there’s a potential $3+ return in economic growth, which would boost the global economy by more than $1 trillion a year by 2040. Global WA partners are doing incredible work to close this gap as part of a growing commitment to change the status quo.

Innovation and Healthcare Systems

To start, in the last several years the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation established Gender Equality as a major pillar of their work and a program team focused exclusively on women’s health innovations. As part of this effort, Gates leads the Innovation Equity Forum, a group of 250+ experts in research and development (R&D) of women’s health that authored the 2023 Women’s Health Innovation Opportunity Map. Though not a map per se, the document identifies 50 critical opportunities across the R&D ecosystem to catalyze women’s health innovations, from data and modeling to research design and methodology.

According to CARE, approximately 1 in 49 women in poor countries die from preventable causes related to pregnancy, and in Sierra Leone, it’s 1 in 17 women. One of CARE’s 2030 goals is for 30 million more women to be able to access their right to sexual and reproductive health. Their Right to Health strategy aims to build resilient, equitable, and accountable health systems that can deliver the health solutions we already have on this earth to everyone who needs them. In Bihar, India in particular, a project with the Gates Foundation focused on reducing the rates of maternal, newborn, and child mortality and malnutrition, and improving immunization rates and reproductive health services across the state. Their work reduced the maternal mortality rate by almost half in 16 years.

Read the full article about narrowing the health equity gap by Cady Susswein at Global Washington.