Someone told me women’s health isn’t really underfunded, or at least no more than men’s. I felt he was wrong, but I had no numbers to prove it. So I went and found them, and decided to share what I learned.
I wanted to answer the question: “Is women’s health research and innovation underfunded? And if so, how bad is it?” And the short answer is: yes, but not evenly. Some conditions are genuinely in crisis, barely studied, barely funded. Others, breast cancer being the clear example, are actually very well resourced. “Women’s health” isn’t one bucket of money, it’s dozens of separate ones.
Quick disclaimer: I’m a psychologist, not an economist. This is a summary of what the research and government data says, with a source for figures I have found.
Why this matters:
So much pain, suffering, medical gaslighting and neglect is experienced by women specifically and a large part of it could be prevented or treated with adequate funding. It is 2026 - Elon Musk has enough spare money to make cars fly, but 70% of people with PMOS are still undiagnosed? [1]
Women spend 25% more of their lives in poor health compared to men [2]
Closing the women’s health gap by 2040 could boost the global economy by $1 trillion annually. It has an attractive return on investment for governments [2]. For every $1 invested into women’s health, $3 of economic return are generated. Some sources report even higher estimates [3].
How do you measure funding?
Women’s health research is funded from many places: governments, charities, and private investors, including venture capital. Each reports in its own way, some barely report at all, and there is no agreed definition of what counts as “women’s health”. Comparing men and women is hard, because the starting point was never equal. For most of modern medicine, research was built around men, so a fair comparison today has to account for decades of catching up. That is why the data is limited and the numbers vary so much from one source to the next. We are going to look at evidence from different perspectives.
The US: the pie grew, but women’s slice shrank.
In the US, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) tracks what share of its own budget goes towards women’s health research. The NIH looked at women-specific conditions, and sex differences in conditions affecting both men and women. Here’s what surprised me. A report shows that the NIH funding for women’s health fell from 9.7% in 2013 to 7.9% in 2023 [4]. The overall budget of the NIH increased in the last decade, however the share that goes to women’s health got smaller. The pie got bigger, but the slice got smaller.
Interestingly, the money isn’t spread evenly either. Breast cancer, for instance, pulls in a very large amount of funding ($8.36 billion from 2013 to 2022, while uterine cancer gets $435 million and cervical cancer gets $1.1 billion from the NIH in the same time frame [5]. Conditions like endometriosis (received $215 million from 2013 to 2022 from the NIH [6]), PMS, PMDD and vulvodynia get a tiny fraction of the funding that breast cancer gets. Breast cancer is a success story - it is well known, and a lot is invested in research and innovation. It shows that it is possible, and how far the other conditions still have to go. It is hard to see so little funding for conditions whose basics are still not understood, not to mention research on possible treatments.
You may have read that in October 2026 Trump signed an executive order to create a women’s health division at NIH, and a White House task force for women’s health - sounds great, right? Until you read that it names no dedicated funding or targets! And he revoked an earlier Biden-era initiative that had requested to spend $12 billion on women’s health research, that was never enacted.
The EU and the Netherlands: Big promises, but a murkier picture
The EU doesn’t publish the same kind of year-over-year tracking the NIH does, so I can’t give you a precise percentage. But there is money moving: over €2 billion has gone toward over 1000 different women’s health research and innovation projects since 2014 [7]. And a little improvement is that most EU-funded research has to consider sex and gender differences (in research proposals, we now have to analyse and report whether sex and gender differences of participants might be impacting our study).
In 2025 the Dutch government launched its first national strategy for women’s health, essentially admitting the gap exists and needs fixing. However, most of the points listed are programes that already exist, there is no new budget created for the strategy, and it is relatively vague in terms of how they want to achieve the goals. It is a step in the right direction, but needs more concrete steps and funding.
Innovation is a separate pot of money.
Move one step further, into innovation, the startups and products that actually turn research into something patients can use, and the funding gap doesn’t close, it stays wide. Femtech, health tech built specifically for women’s bodies, has been estimated to only get around 2.2% of health venture capital funding in 2016. Now in 2026, Femtech only gets around 0.6% of health venture capital funding [8]. So the share has decreased over the last 10 years (not necessarily the total amount invested). Considering how many new Femtech start-ups there are, with a lot of potential to help women, I find it surprising to see that the share of health investment has decreased.
In private healthcare capital, women’s health receives 6% of funding, and companies that are exclusively focused on women’s health receive less than 1% of private healthcare capital [9].
What about men’s health?
Men’s health is not the underfunded side. NIH’s current sex-specific categories does send more to women-only conditions than to men-only conditions, but they cover only a fifth of the budget. The bigger gap is in the other 80%: shared conditions, like heart disease, that were long studied mostly in men. There is a large existing research and innovation basis for men’s health. The real gap is whether research on shared conditions tells us how they work in women.
The disease burden (how severely the disease impacts wellbeing) compared to the funding is a way to estimate whether something is underfunded or overfunded. A study found that in around ¾ of cases where a disease affects primarily one gender, the funding pattern favours males. Either the disease affects more women and is underfunded compared with its burden, or the disease affects more men and is overfunded [10].
So, is women’s health underfunded?
Based on the evidence that I have found, the answer is YES. Chronic, hormonal, historically dismissed conditions, think PMS, endometriosis, PMOS or menopause are the ones left behind, while breast cancer is very well-funded and well-known. And that gap shows up at every stage: these conditions are understudied to begin with, and even where the research does exist, Femtech still gets only a sliver of venture capital to turn it into something patients can actually use. And when comparing conditions that mainly affect women to those that mainly affect men, women-specific conditions get less funding.
Further resources I recommend skimming through:
Closing the women’s health gap: A $1 Trillion Opportunity to improve lives and economies. (WEF and McKinsey report)
Women’s Health Investment Outlook: 6% of Funding for Nearly 50% of the Population – Not Just a Gap, but Untapped White Space (WEF and BSG report - Jan 2026)
Dutch national strategy women’s health
References:
“Polycystic Ovary Syndrome,” World Health Organisation (WHO), 2026, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/polycystic-ovary-syndrome.
Kweilin Ellingrud, Closing the Women’s Health Gap | McKinsey (2024), https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/closing-the-womens-health-gap-a-1-trillion-dollar-opportunity-to-improve-lives-and-economies.
Lucia Orozco Lopez, La Revolución Femtech En Europa: Por Qué Invertirahora En Salud Femenina | Capital Cell, February 13, 2026, https://capitalcell.com/en/femtech-in-europe/.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Health and Medicine Division; Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice;
Committee on the Assessment of NIH Research on Women’s Health, A New Vision for Women’s Health Research: Transformative Change at the National Institutes of Health, ed.
Amy Geller et al., The National Academies Collection: Reports Funded by National Institutes of Health (National Academies Press (US), 2025), http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK610008/.Jordyn Sava, “High-Mortality Cancers Underfunded Despite National Burden | Targeted Onc - Immunotherapy, Biomarkers, and Cancer Pathways,” July 24, 2025, https://www.targetedonc.com/view/high-mortality-cancers-underfunded-despite-national-burden.
“NIH Research Funding for Endometriosis U.S. 2025,” Statista, accessed October 29, 2026, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1242205/endometriosis-research-funding-united-states/.
“EU Research and Innovation on Women’s Health,” accessed October 29, 2026, https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/research-area/health/womens-health_en.
“Femtech, Dealroom Deep Dive,” Dealroom.Co, accessed October 29, 2026, https://dealroom.co/guides/femtech.
“Women’s Health Investment Outlook,” World Economic Forum, accessed October 29, 2026, https://www.weforum.org/publications/women-s-health-investment-outlook-2026/.
Arthur A. Mirin, “Gender Disparity in the Funding of Diseases by the U.S. National Institutes of Health,” Journal of Women’s Health 30, no. 7 (2021): 956–63, https://doi.org/10.1089/jwh.2020.8682.
© 2026 Natascha Storf, Clinical Curiosity. This article may not be reproduced or republished without written permission.
