McKinsey & Company published a report shining the light on the women's health gap.

What is the gap? The disparity between women's lifespan and healthspan. According to McKinsey women spend 25% more time in “poor health” relative to men. They estimate that addressing this could boost the global economy by at least $1 trillion annually by 2040.

Some highlights from the report:

💡 Simplified: Women’s health is often simplified to include only sexual and reproductive health, which underrepresents women’s health burden. It's important to go beyond this - general health conditions (eg. cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases) may affect women differently or disproportionately. The report says that actually, the majority of the burden comes from these.

💡 Deprioritised: Research in women’s health primarily focuses on diseases with high mortality, overlooking diseases leading to disability. There is up to a tenfold higher volume of new therapies in development for some of the most common cancers compared with debilitating gynaecological conditions like endometriosis. The delay in the diagnosis of these conditions filters into how investors or researchers prioritize needs and assess market potential.

💡 Unknown: Systematic lack of research means we have limited disease understanding and missing sex-disaggregated evidence for various therapies and treatments. It's getting better, however, we are still seeing that evidence for intervention effectiveness is sometimes drawn from unrepresentative populations (inadequate recruitment of women and minorities).

💡 Unmeasured: There is limited understanding of how diseases manifest differently in women and a lack of data on some women-specific conditions. There is also a lack of consistent measurement scales for conditions and symptoms affecting women. For example, definitions of health-related burden associated with menopause, contraception side effects and menstrual syndromes.

At Dama Health, we are tapping into this large unmet need and resulting opportunity! We are tackling the women's health gap by addressing the trial and error of prescribing, starting with contraception.

By Dr Paulina Cecula (co-founder of Dama Health)