I’m frustrated, not in a vague or abstract way but in the grounded way that comes from sitting in the same rooms, hearing the same conversations, and watching the same patterns repeat year after year.
We’re not short on awareness in women’s health anymore. We’re short on action.
For years, I’ve been part of this ecosystem across industry, investment, global health, and nonprofit work. I’ve spoken on the stages, I’ve sat in the strategy sessions, and I’ve been in the rooms where people say, “This is the moment for women’s health.” Every time, I want to believe it. Every time, I look at what actually happens next and find that we mostly keep talking to each other.
We go to conferences where everyone already agrees that women’s health matters. We publish reports reinforcing what we already know. We celebrate incremental wins as if they’re systemic change.
That’s one of the reasons I’ve taken the controversial position of skipping most women’s health conferences over the past year, unless the audience is new to the topic. I take that position out of strong support for the industry, not despite it. I want our voices in every healthcare room, not only the ones where our friends are.
Meanwhile, the fundamentals haven’t shifted nearly enough. Investment is still inconsistent. Partnerships still take too long. Innovation still struggles to reach the women who actually need it, especially outside developed markets.
We’ve gotten very good at describing the problem. We’ve been much slower at doing something about it.
I say that as someone who has been in this work for over two decades, building, operating, advising, fundraising, and trying to move things forward from multiple angles. I’ve seen how decisions actually get made. Most of the barriers we talk about aren’t new, aren’t surprising, and aren’t unsolvable. They’re just not being addressed with urgency.
Where Women’s Health Funding Still Falls Short
There are bright spots. The Gates Foundation’s $2.5 billion commitment through 2030, announced in 2025, is meaningful and should be celebrated. Pharma giant Gedeon Richter recently acquired Celmatix’s women’s health drug discovery portfolio, signaling that big pharma is looking seriously at this space. Smaller companies are partnering with larger ones in ways that didn’t exist five years ago.
Honestly, those moments still stand out because they’re the exception. Women are over half the population, and the funding allocated to their health, especially beyond cancer and fertility, remains disproportionately low. The reason isn’t that the need is unclear.
Why Women’s Health Partnerships Stall
You see the same pattern in partnerships. Everyone says they want to collaborate. Everyone agrees that cross-sector work is the only way this gets solved. But when it comes time to actually align incentives, share risk, and move faster, things slow down. Deals stall, priorities shift, and internal hurdles take over. Instead of building, we keep talking about building.
The Global Gap Isn’t Innovation. It’s Execution.
Globally, the picture is even more stark. Millions of women die from conditions that are preventable, diagnosable, and treatable. The majority of premature deaths from non-communicable diseases happen in low- and middle-income countries. We know this. Yet access to basic tools, diagnostics, and care remains inconsistent at best.
That isn’t an innovation gap. It’s an execution gap.
One of the moments that brought this home for me wasn’t in a boardroom or a conference. I was in Mexico with a firm I was consulting for, launching a new facility. I sat with a family who had access to healthcare in theory. On paper, they were covered. In reality, they were making trade-offs that nobody should have to make. Do we spend money on treatment, or do we feed the rest of the family?
That conversation stayed with me because it stripped away all the language we tend to use in this space, including access, equity, and innovation, and made the question very simple. If what we build doesn’t actually reach people in a way they can use, it doesn’t matter.
That’s where I think we’ve gotten stuck. We’ve built an ecosystem that’s very good at conversation and not as good at follow-through.
I get it. This is a complex space. Healthcare is hard. Global systems are messy. There are regulatory challenges, financial constraints, and cultural differences. All of that is true. At some point, complexity becomes an excuse for inaction, and we’re past that point.
Why Women’s Health Has to Leave Its Own Bubble
So this is where I land.
We need to stop only talking, stop only going to women’s health conferences, and stop creating massive collectives that reinforce what we already believe among people who already agree.
The next move is breaking out of the bubble. The conversation about women’s health needs to live in the rooms where general healthcare decisions get made: investment committees that don’t have a women’s health thesis, hospital systems looking at population health, employers building benefit strategies, payers writing reimbursement policy, and regulatory bodies setting evidence standards. Those rooms are where allocation actually happens.
That doesn’t mean abandoning the women’s health community. It means refusing to let the conversation stay there. The women’s health field has done its job in establishing the evidence base. The next phase is integration into mainstream healthcare strategy, capital allocation, and product design. That’s a different audience and a different conversation.
People across the industry are doing meaningful work, and I want to acknowledge that. The point I want to make is that we’ve outgrown the awareness phase, and the next decade of progress depends on whether the field can stop preaching to itself and start showing up everywhere else.
What’s needed is simpler than that: decisions, follow-through, and the willingness to take the conversation into rooms that aren’t already convinced.
That’s how women’s health stops being a category and starts being infrastructure.