About a decade ago, I was working with a friend in Costa Rica who ran the country’s largest breast cancer nonprofit. She told me that women in the eastern region had stopped getting screened because the only mammography unit in their area had been broken for years.
I was working for the largest mammography manufacturer in the world at the time, and we had functional units sitting in U.S. warehouses, waiting to be discarded because newer models had come to market. We got one of those units to the region. Several years later, the regional mortality rate had dropped by approximately tenfold.
I keep that story in my head when I read GDP forecasts.
Every woman that screening protected was a worker, a caregiver, a household decision-maker, a participant in the local economy.
The capital cost of moving a working machine to a region that didn’t have one was a rounding error against the GDP impact of the women whose lives it preserved. But no government, no investor, and no corporate strategy team had built the case for moving it.
That story is repeating itself across thousands of regions and millions of women right now, and most economists aren’t modeling it.
What the Numbers Say
The McKinsey Health Institute calculated the cost of the women’s health gap at $1 trillion per year. A separate McKinsey Global Institute analysis projects that closing gender gaps in health and employment could add $12 trillion to global GDP. Both of those numbers should be flashing red on every CFO’s desk in the global economy. They aren’t.
Why?
Venture funding for women’s health remains below 2% of total health investment, per Rock Health. NIH research spending on women’s health averaged 8.8% from 2013 to 2023 and shrank as the NIH budget grew. Women weren’t allowed to participate in most clinical trials until the 1993 NIH Revitalization Act. Drug metabolism studies, diagnostic thresholds, and reimbursement codes were built around male physiology and retrofitted later. The result is a healthcare system that misdiagnoses women’s heart attacks because the symptoms present differently than men’s, takes years on average to diagnose endometriosis (a disease that affects more than 190 million women globally, per the WHO), and continues to design clinical AI on datasets that don’t disaggregate by sex.
This is a structural mispricing.
Why This Is in Your Numbers Right Now
If you’re a CFO, the drag shows up as healthcare expenditure growth outpacing wages. If you’re sitting in a board meeting, it shows up as senior leadership pipelines that thin out at exactly the career stage when women are dealing with cardiovascular risk increases, perimenopause, and chronic conditions the company has built no infrastructure to support.
Mayo Clinic Proceedings put the cost of unmanaged menopause symptoms in the U.S. workforce at $1.8 billion annually in missed workdays alone. That doesn’t include presenteeism, the downsizing of ambition by women the company built no system to retain, or the talent search and onboarding costs when a 50-year-old VP leaves and gets replaced by someone the company has to bring up to speed. Stenberg and colleagues at the Lancet have shown returns of up to $9 in economic value for every $1 invested in women’s and children’s health. The Lancet Commission on Women and Cardiovascular Disease estimates that closing cardiovascular care gaps would prevent millions of premature deaths globally.
You aren’t paying for the absence of women’s health investment in a line item called “women’s health.” You’re paying for it in attrition, healthcare spend overruns, productivity drag, and the slow erosion of senior leadership benches that should be deeper than they are.
What Aware Leaders Are Doing
The economies and companies that will outperform in the next decade are the ones whose finance teams stop classifying women’s health as a benefits line and start treating it as the infrastructure investment it is.
In practice, that means building early diagnostics that catch cardiovascular disease in women before the first event, training clinical AI on sex-disaggregated data, restructuring reimbursement codes to cover the conditions women actually present with, and writing workforce policies that don’t force mid-career women to choose between their health and their advancement.
The capital is available and the technology exists. The framing doesn’t.
Women’s health isn’t a cost center; it’s an economic multiplier. The leaders who treat it that way will build stronger companies, stronger health systems, and stronger nations. The ones who continue to file it under DEI or niche-vertical will keep wondering why growth underperforms projections and why workforce participation among prime-earning women keeps slipping.
The drag is already priced into the stagnation. The question is whether anyone in capital allocation decides to do something about it.
That’s the question the next decade will answer.