News
McKinsey report underscores US$1tn potential of closing gender health gap
The report looked at new research sizing the health and economic potential of investing in women’s health
A new “ground-breaking” report has highlighted the US$1tn potential of closing the gender gap in healthcare.
The report, published by the McKinsey Health Institute in collaboration with the World Economic Forum Centre for Health and Healthcare, analysed at the root causes driving the gender disparities in healthcare and outlined the actions needed to address the shortcomings that limit the ability of many women to live to their full potential.
Women spend on average 25 per cent more time in poor health than men, with studies showing they fare more poorly compared with men in relation to disease prevalence, access to healthcare and outcomes after treatment.
The McKinsey report found that closing the gender health gap could reduce the time women spend in poor health by almost two-thirds and add up to US$1tn to the economy annually by 2040.
Additionally, the research showed that bridging the gender gap could lead to an additional seven healthy days for every woman each year, or more than 500 days over a woman’s lifetime.
“Women have been treated by the scientific and medical communities as though they are small men, when our entire biology is different,” explained Anouk Petersen, report co-author and health equity co-leader of the McKinsey Health Institute.
“Women’s health is often simplified to include only sexual and reproductive health, which meaningfully underrepresents women’s health burden.
“We must evolve our understanding of women’s health to look at the whole person in a much more specific way if we are going to close this gap.”
Pooja Kumar, report co-author and global leader of the McKinsey Health Institute, said: “We know where the inequities are, and we need to address them.
“Fifty-six percent of the women’s health burden is due to health conditions that are more prevalent or manifest differently in women. This is a clear signal about the need for more investment in understanding and addressing women’s health.”
Kweilin Ellingrud, co-author and director of the McKinsey Global Institute, added: “Narrowing the gap would lead to fewer early deaths, fewer health conditions per woman, extended economic and societal capacity to contribute, and increased productivity.
“Of these outcomes, the largest economic impact comes from women experiencing fewer health conditions, enabling them to avoid 24 million life years lost to disability and boosting economic productivity by up to US$400bn.”
The report found that for every US$1 invested in women’s health, about US$3 is projected in economic growth, generating the equivalent impact of 137 million women accessing full-time positions by 2040.
The authors said that unlocking this potential could be possible with “concrete” steps, such as investing in women-centric research, collecting and analysing sex, ethnicity, and gender-specific data, enhancing access to gender-specific care, incentivising new financing models and establishing business policies that support women’s health.
Valentina Sartori, report co-author and affiliated leader of the McKinsey Health Institute, said: “We can address this gap.
“Now that we have sized the opportunity, of addressing the women’s health gap, we can unleash the investment needed for stronger sex-based care delivery and R&D, and continue to generate the data that expands our knowledge and helps close the gap.”
Lucy Pérez, report co-author and co-leader of the McKinsey Health Institute’s health equity portfolio, added: “To improve health equity and foster economic growth, stakeholders across sectors and industries must develop a cooperative and comprehensive strategy to address women’s health.
“There is a tremendous opportunity to support the health of women, and a clear business case for making these investments.”
To receive the Femtech World newsletter, sign up here.
The FDA will remove the menopause drug warning from hormone therapies, citing updated evidence on stroke and heart risks.
US health officials said Monday they will drop the boxed warning — the strongest safety alert on a drug label — from more than 20 pills, patches and creams with hormones such as oestrogen and progestin, used to ease hot flushes and night sweats.
The 22-year-old warning told doctors that hormone therapy raises the risk of blood clots, heart problems and other issues, based on an influential study published more than 20 years ago.
FDA commissioner Marty Makary called the current label outdated and unnecessary. Officials pointed to studies suggesting hormone therapy carries few risks when started before age 60 and within 10 years of symptoms beginning.
health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said: “We’re challenging outdated thinking and recommitting to evidence-based medicine that empowers rather than restricts.”
Medical guidelines generally advise limited-duration use in younger women going through the menopause who do not have complicating risks, such as breast cancer. The FDA’s updated prescribing information largely aligns with that approach.
Makary and some other doctors have argued that benefits may extend beyond symptom relief. Before becoming FDA commissioner, Makary devoted a chapter of his latest book to what he described as the overall benefits of hormone therapy and criticised doctors unwilling to prescribe it.
On Monday he repeated that view, citing figures suggesting hormone therapy reduces heart disease, Alzheimer’s and other age-related conditions. Makary told reporters: “With few exceptions, there may be no other medication in the modern era that can improve the health outcomes of women at a population level more than hormone replacement therapy.”
The scale of those benefits remains under study. Dr JoAnn Manson of Harvard Medical School said the evidence for overall health benefits is not “as conclusive or definitive” as Makary suggested.
Still, she said removing the warning could help doctors and patients make more personalised decisions. Manson said: “The black box is really one size fits all. It scares everyone away. Without the black box warning there may be more focus on the actual findings, how they differ by age and underlying health factors.”
In the 1990s, more than one in four US women took oestrogen alone or with progestin, amid assumptions it would cut rates of heart disease, dementia and other problems, as well as treat symptoms.
But a landmark study of more than 26,000 women challenged that, linking two hormone pill types to higher rates of stroke, blood clots, breast cancer and other serious risks. After the 2002 findings were published, prescriptions fell across age groups.
Makary said: “That study was misrepresented and created a fear machine that lingers to this day.”
A new analysis of the 2002 data, published in September, found women in their 50s on oestrogen-based drugs had no increased risk of heart problems, while women in their 70s did; the data for women in their 60s was unclear.
Since the early 2000s, newer forms have arrived, including vaginal creams and tablets that deliver lower doses than pills and patches.
The original warning language will still be available to prescribers but placed lower on the label. The drugs will keep a boxed warning that women who have not had a hysterectomy (surgical removal of the uterus) should take a combination of oestrogen-progestin due to the risk of cancer in the uterine lining.
Rather than convening one of the FDA’s standing advisory committees on women’s health or drug safety, Makary earlier this year invited a dozen doctors and researchers who overwhelmingly supported the health benefits of hormone-replacement drugs. Many of the panellists at the July meeting consult for drugmakers or prescribe the medicines in private practice. Two of the experts also spoke at Monday’s FDA news conference.
Asked Monday why the FDA did not convene a formal advisory panel, Makary said such meetings are “bureaucratic, long, often conflicted and very expensive.”
Diana Zuckerman of the non-profit National Centre for Health Research accused Makary of undermining the FDA’s credibility by announcing the change “rather than having scientists scrutinise the research at an FDA scientific meeting.”
A London executive is suing a fertility clinic, alleging its IVF treatment led to her suffering a stroke.
Navkiran Dhillon-Byrne, 51, began private IVF treatment at the Assisted Reproduction and Gynaecology Centre (ARGC) in Wimpole Street, London, in April 2018.
Ten days after her treatment ended, on 28 April 2018, she suffered a stroke, which her lawyers say has left her with ongoing vision problems.
Ms Dhillon-Byrne is now suing the clinic and its head, Mohamed Taranissi, for negligence and breach of duty, saying medics failed to give her sufficient warnings about stroke risks linked to IVIg immunotherapy (intravenous immunoglobulin) – a one-off add-on treatment designed to moderate the body’s immune responses during pregnancy.
The clinic and Dr Taranissi deny liability, saying Ms Dhillon-Byrne was fully informed of the risks.
They also dispute that IVIg caused her stroke.
Central London County Court heard that Ms Dhillon-Byrne, chief marketing officer at the City of London base of an international software company, turned to private treatment after the NHS was unable to fund her IVF in 2014.
She had an unsuccessful attempt at another London clinic before choosing ARGC. She told the court she had been trying to have a child since 2014.
She said she selected ARGC after a friend recommended it, praising what they described as high success rates.
The clinic’s website describes its approach as “IVF boot camp” and promotes “in-depth investigations, daily monitoring and real-time treatment adjustments.”
Ms Dhillon-Byrne says she was not warned of the “specific” risks of thrombosis – blood clotting that can lead to stroke – in relation to the IVIg therapy.
She also says the clinic overstated her chances of success and failed to secure her “informed consent” before treatment began.
She argues that, had she been given a clear picture of her chance of a successful pregnancy, she would not have consented to IVF and the supplemental IVIg therapy.
Denying Ms Dhillon-Byrne’s claims, the clinic’s KC, Clodagh Bradley, told the court that the success rate advice given was “accurate and in accordance with the ARGC data.”
She added that Ms Dhillon-Byrne had been informed that the immune treatment was new and “still controversial.”
Lawyers said outside court that, if successful, Ms Dhillon-Byrne’s claim is likely to be worth “millions” due to the impact of the stroke on her high-flying career.
The trial continues.
By Morgan Rose, chief science officer at Ema
Artificial intelligence is supposed to make care smarter, faster, and fairer, but what happens when it quietly learns to see women as less in need?
New research from the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre (CPEC) at the London School of Economics, led by Sam Rickman, reveals a concerning truth: large language models (LLMs) used to summarie long-term care records may be introducing gender bias into decisions about who receives support.
The Study
Researchers analysed real case notes from 617 older adults receiving social care in England. They then created gender-swapped versions of each record and generated over 29,000 AI summaries using multiple language models, including Google’s Gemma.’
The goal was simple: would AI treat men’s and women’s needs the same way?
It didn’t.
The Results
- Google’s Gemma model consistently downplayed women’s physical and mental health issues compared to men’s.
- Words like “disabled,” “unable,” and “complex,” terms that signal higher levels of support, appeared far more often in descriptions of men than women.
- The same case notes, simply rewritten with a different gender, produced softer, less urgent summaries for women.
In other words, when the algorithm rewrote her story, her needs shrank.
The Cost of Softer Language
Language isn’t neutral. In healthcare, it’s the difference between monitor and act.
Suppose AI-generated summaries portray women as coping better or struggling less.
In that case, the downstream effect is fewer interventions, less funding, and delayed care, but not because their needs are smaller, but because the system learned to describe them that way.
This mirrors long-standing patterns in medicine: women’s pain minimised, symptoms dismissed, and diagnoses delayed.
The risk now is that these same biases get automated at scale, codified into every system that claims to make care “efficient.”
Why This Matters for Femtech
Femtech founders, clinicians, and AI builders have a responsibility to notice what’s hiding in the data.
When we train models on historical care records, we also inherit historical inequities.
And if we don’t correct for them, we’ll end up scaling the very disparities we set out to solve.
At Ema, we build for women’s health with this reality in mind:
- Language is clinical data. Every word shapes care pathways.
- Bias is not neutralised by scale. It’s magnified by it.
- Ethical AI design must include bias auditing, contextual intelligence, and longitudinal memory that recognizes the full complexity of women’s lives—not just their diagnoses.
The Path Forward
Fixing this isn’t about scrapping AI.
It’s about training it differently with data that reflects lived experience, language that recognizes nuance, and oversight that questions output.
Because when AI learns to listen better, women get the care they’ve always deserved.
Source:
-
Hormonal health3 weeks agoDozens of women report suffering painful burns after using Always sanitary towels
-
News4 weeks agoWomen’s health innovations recognised in TIME’s Best Inventions 2025
-
News3 weeks agoCutting through the noise in femtech – key takeaways from Women’s Health Week 2025
-
Hormonal health4 weeks agoMenstrual cycle affects women’s reaction time, study finds
-
Entrepreneur2 weeks agoAI embryo selection tool wins European approval
-
Insight3 weeks agoScientists develop breakthrough approach to detecting endometriosis in menstrual blood
-
News2 weeks agoTestosterone patch shows promise for menopausal women
-
Features2 weeks agoFrom SEO to GEO: How women’s health brands can get found in the age of AI
1 Comment