By Paula Bellostas Muguerza and Anna Bode
Private capital has finally started to turn its attention to women’s health. After decades of being sidelined, the sector has attracted roughly $34 billion in private capital since 2020, as noted in our recent paper, accelerating private capital investment in women’s health. But this isn’t a clear-cut, feel-good story. Most of the funding has focused on fertility and breast cancer. Meanwhile, the conditions carrying some of the heaviest burden on women’s health and lives — heart disease, autoimmune disorders, neurodegeneration, mental health — remain seriously underfunded.
The Scale of the Gap
The numbers relate this story: Less than 2% of the $471 billion in global philanthropic funding directly benefited women and girls, and only a fraction of that reached women’s health specifically. At the National Institutes of Health, less than 10% of a $48.4 billion research budget was directed at women’s health. In the pharmaceutical sector, only 7% of R&D spending in 2024 targeted women-specific conditions, and nearly all of that went to women’s cancers, leaving about 1% for everything else, including endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome and a range of other conditions specifically affecting hundreds of millions of women worldwide.
Yes, this is an equity and gender equality issue, but it’s also an economic issue. According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), women spend approximately 25% more time in poor health than men. According to WEF, closing that gap through targeted investment could unlock up to $1 trillion in additional global economic output each year by 2040. Every dollar invested in women’s health generates an estimated three dollars in economic growth. What benefits women in the short term will end up benefiting everyone in the long term.
Where the Money Is Going — and Where It Isn’t
Of the $34 billion deployed by private capital in women’s health between 2020 and 2025, roughly two-thirds flowed into women-specific conditions: Fertility attracted $7.9 billion, breast cancer $3.6 billion and broader gynecological diseases $1.7 billion. To investors, they feel safe.
But what’s getting left out? Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death among women worldwide, yet most cardiac research, diagnostics and therapies are still modeled on male physiology. It attracted just $2.1 billion in private capital over the same five-year period. Autoimmune diseases affect women at rates up to 10 times higher than men and remain chronically underfunded and underdiagnosed, drawing $2.1 billion. Alzheimer’s, which disproportionately affects women, received $2.6 billion. Depressive and anxiety disorders, more prevalent in women and carrying enormous social and economic weight, drew $1.3 billion and $0.7 billion respectively.
No single comparison captures the misalignment more sharply than this: Endometriosis affects roughly 10% of women of reproductive age, the same prevalence as diabetes, yet receives a fraction of the investment. Every American is aware of the diabetes crisis. The average man doesn’t even know what endometriosis is. It is both necessary and strategic for private capital to change this.
Why the Cycle Persists, and Why Private Equity Is the Key to Breaking It
The underinvestment in women’s health is not due to a lack of opportunity. It stems from a set of interlocking barriers that reinforce one another. Science remains constrained by historical bias: For decades, women were excluded from clinical research, and those data gaps persist today. Policy has been slow to catch up, with regulatory frameworks that rarely incentivize gender-specific research and reimbursement models that do not reward innovation in underrecognized areas. Care systems fail women at the point of contact, with longer diagnostic delays and more frequent misdiagnoses, on average, it takes nearly a decade for a woman with endometriosis to receive a definitive diagnosis. And investment ecosystems themselves are shaped by bias, with women representing a small minority of decision makers globally.
Here’s where private equity comes in. Large pharmaceutical companies are understandably drawn to drugs with broad-population efficacy; gender-specific therapeutics and diagnostics are harder to prioritize within that model. Major diagnostics players tend to favor platforms with the widest possible reach. Private equity, by contrast, can move into the gaps, identifying high-efficacy opportunities in underserved populations, funding them to scale and building toward exits. The transactions already happening in fertility and oncology prove that women’s health generates real financial returns.
There is also a gap between early-stage innovation and growth capital. Significant investment is happening at seed, Series A, and Series B, digital health tools, new therapeutics, tech-enabled care platforms. But without growth capital to bridge those companies toward maturity, the innovation pipeline cannot reach exits, and the virtuous cycle of proof, confidence and broader investment cannot begin.
The Path Forward
Three areas in particular warrant close attention from investors in the near term. First, integrated women’s health clinics are emerging as a compelling model, platforms that provide wraparound care across a woman’s life stages, from reproductive health through menopause and beyond, with an eye on cardiovascular and metabolic health as well.
Second, there is significant activity around non-hormonal therapeutics for menopause and the tools to support them, including hormone testing innovations that are making previously opaque biological data far more accessible.
Third, women-specific brain health is becoming a serious area of scientific and commercial focus. New research is establishing with greater precision what menopause does to the brain, and that knowledge is beginning to attract the kind of attention that drives investment.
The next wave of innovation in women’s health will not come from drug pipelines alone. Diagnostics, digital health platforms, and integrated care models have the potential to be just as transformative, shortening diagnostic delays, enabling prevention at scale and creating the infrastructure that makes other investments viable. When investors ask why they should fund a therapeutic for endometriosis given the absence of reliable diagnostics, the answer is not to wait: It is to fund the diagnostics too.
The momentum is building. The Gates Foundation has committed $2.5 billion through 2030 to women’s health research and development. Wellcome Leap and Pivotal have launched a $100 million initiative aimed at accelerating breakthroughs in years rather than decades. These are meaningful signals, but philanthropic capital alone will not close the gap. Private investment, patient, rigorous and willing to look beyond the familiar, is what will determine whether the current moment becomes a genuine turning point.
Women’s health is not a niche. It is half the population, carrying a disproportionate share of the global health burden, with a trillion-dollar opportunity waiting to be unlocked. The cost of inaction in lost health, lost productivity and lost potential, far exceeds the cost of change. This is not a time for incrementalism.
Paula Bellostas Muguerza is global lead of the Healthcare and Life Sciences practice at Kearney, and Anna Bode is global head of the Kearney Health Institute. They can be reached, respectively, at Paula.BellostasMuguerza@kearney.com and Anna.Bode@kearney.com.
