Women’s health: the costliest problem no one wants to see

I want to begin with a figure that has stayed with me for years and that, the more I repeat it, the more of a scandal it seems: women live longer than men, yet we spend 25% more of our lives in poor health. It is not a biological paradox. It is the result of decades of decisions (scientific, political, economic) that built health systems for bodies that are not ours.

In January 2024, the World Economic Forum and the McKinsey Health Institute released in Davos the first global report to quantify this with rigor. The title says it all: Closing the Women’s Health Gap: A $1 Trillion Opportunity. A trillion dollars a year that the world leaves on the table because it does not take women’s health seriously. And that trillion is, in all likelihood, a conservative estimate, because data on the conditions that affect us has been so systematically ignored that we do not even know the true size of the problem.

But this is not only a health problem. It is a problem of power, of science, and of how we design the systems that are supposed to care for us.

Invisible problem #1

Medicine was designed for a body that is not ours

For decades, the male body was the default standard of biomedical research. Clinical trials excluded women for years, officially to avoid hormonal variability, in practice for methodological convenience. The result: today we have drugs whose efficacy in women is unknown or lower, and conditions affecting millions of women that only in recent years began to be taken seriously.

The WEF and McKinsey report analyzed more than 650 academic studies and found something that should shame us: only half disaggregated results by sex. And among those that did, outcomes were worse for women in nearly two-thirds of cases. We are not talking about biological bad luck. We are talking about systematic bias, reproduced in every generation of researchers, physicians and policymakers.

There is one example I use often because I find it especially revealing: endometriosis affects 1 in 10 women worldwide. In 2024, the average time to a correct diagnosis was up to 10 years. Ten years of pain, of dismissed visits, of being told ‘it’s normal,’ ‘it’s stress,’ ‘all women have it.’ It is not normal. It is a system failure.

Invisible problem #2

The economic burden that appears in no budget

There is a conversation we need to have with finance ministers, with corporate CFOs, and with decision-makers who still see women’s health as a ‘niche’ or ‘gender’ issue: the cost of ignoring this is not moral, it is economic. And it is enormous.

The WEF and McKinsey estimated that closing the health gap could add at least USD 1 trillion a year to global GDP by 2040. That is equivalent to bringing 137 million women into full-time employment. But the real number is higher, because part of the gap cannot be measured: it lies in the years of productivity lost to undiagnosed conditions, in the unpaid care work that rises when women are ill, in the workplace absenteeism that no HR spreadsheet records as ‘cause: untreated women’s health.’

Investment in women’s health returns 3 to 1 in economic growth. It is not philanthropy. It is the best risk-return ratio in public health, and it is being systematically underfunded.

Invisible problem #3

Women’s pain is not believed, and that has clinical consequences

This is what I find hardest to hold, as a scientist and as a woman: there is solid evidence that women’s pain is systematically underestimated by health systems. Not as subjective perception, as a finding documented in the scientific literature.

An FDA analysis found that women report serious adverse drug events 52% more often than men, and fatal events 36% more often. A review published in 2025 synthesized the evidence on diagnostic delays in young women across neurological, cardiovascular and autoimmune conditions: in every case, women’s symptoms were more often attributed to psychological causes or anxiety before reaching a correct diagnosis.

Women’s pain is not a feminist issue. It is a problem of clinical quality with direct clinical consequences. And as long as we keep treating it as the former, we will not solve the latter.

My position

This will not be solved with awareness. It will be solved with policy and budget.

I have spent more than 20 years in health leadership. I chair the Global Board of Women in Global Health, an organization active in more than 60 countries. I lead Fundación GEDYT, the largest colorectal cancer prevention consortium in Argentina, and I sit on the GEDYT board. And what I see in every context where I work, from Geneva to Buenos Aires, from grassroots organizations to corporate boards, is always the same fault line: consensus on the diagnosis, and paralysis in the action.

The WEF and McKinsey report identifies four areas for action: science (sex-disaggregated research by default), data (systematic collection by sex, ethnicity and gender), care (real access, not declarative), and investment (public and private funding with measurable targets). These are not new recommendations. They have been on the table of health ministries for years and still fail to translate into budget.

Women’s health is not invisible because we lack data. It is invisible because those who make policy and budget decisions still do not see it as a strategic priority. That is what has to change. And that change requires political leadership, not only scientific evidence.

We have the evidence. We have the economic model. We have decades of documentation. What more do we need for this to become a priority of state?