In 2001, the National Academy of Medicine revealed that there is a 17 year lag between when health scientists learn something significant from rigorous research and when health practitioners change their patient care as a result.
This is a huge problem.
This unacceptable timeline is driven, in large part, by our lack of understanding of female bodies. Our understanding of female bodies guides how we identify, prevent, diagnose, and treat conditions that impact women differently and disproportionately —and with only 8.8% of NIH grant spending focused on women’s health, our ability to generate breakthroughs to improve the health of women has lagged behind at an incredible rate to the extent that, according to McKinsey, there is now a $1T sex and gender driven health equity gap.
On International Women’s Day, we reaffirm our commitment to accelerating global action for women’s health research.
To achieve truly equitable progress in health and life sciences, we must make it easier for innovators and researchers to include and accurately represent sex and gender in scientific research at scale. It is especially urgent to remove barriers for a new generation of passionate innovators who want to account for sex and gender in their work but may need additional support to get started.
That’s why we’ve launched the Next Generation Women’s Health Research Award—a bold initiative to empower innovation for the health of women everywhere. We’re committed to funding up to five projects per year for the next five years, offering researchers a “Starter” technology implementation for prospective studies across diverse expertise and domain areas where women are impacted differently and disproportionately.
Let’s close the $1 trillion sex and gender data gap—together.
