Women around the world live 25% more of their lives in poor health than men do, new research from the World Economic Forum found, but implementing a five-point plan to address those inequalities could unlock $1 trillion billion in added world GDP by 2040 and add seven healthy days per year to each woman’s life.
The new report, Blueprint to Close the Women’s Health Gap: How to Improve Lives and Economies for All, published in collaboration with the McKinsey Health Institute, identified nine health conditions that particularly afflict women and contribute to one-third of the poor-health gap: maternal hypertensive disorders, postpartum hemorrhage, ischemic heart disease, cervical cancer, breast cancer, endometriosis, menopause, migraine and premenstrual syndrome.
“Healthier women form the foundation of stronger families, productive workplaces and resilient economies, and yet profound gender gaps in research and scientific innovation continue to deny women the basic tools, treatments and services they need to remain healthy,” said Anita Zaidi, Board co-chair of the Global Alliance for Women’s Health and President of Gender Equality at the Gates Foundation.
She praised the WEF’s launch of Women’s Health Impact Tracking, a publicly accessible tool designed to measure and address global health gaps and promote equitable, scalable solutions worldwide. “The platform fills a critical need by providing data that is both comprehensive enough to capture the complexity of women’s lives and simple enough to act on,” she said.
The results of the study and the launch of the Women’s Health Impact tracker were announced at the World Economic Forum meeting this week in Davos, Switzerland.
The research identifies five key actions for stakeholders to address these imbalances and unlock the vast, untapped potential of greater health equity:
- Count women: Invest in better data collection to reveal the real burden of women’s health conditions.
- Study women: Fund research into female-specific health concerns and sex-based differences.
- Care for women: Ensure clinical guidelines reflect best practices tailored to women’s unique needs.
- Include all women: Address disparities affecting marginalized groups for broader health equity.
- Invest in women: Mobilize funding for innovative health-care solutions and delivery models.
“It is time to count women, study women, care for women, invest in women and include all women,” said Lucy Pérez, senior partner at McKinsey & Company and co-leader of the McKinsey Health Institute. “Addressing these conditions can not only improve the lives of millions of women and unlock economic uplift – it provides a blueprint for scaling and tracking progress to close the broader women’s health gap.”
The new report highlights critical disparities in women’s health outcomes, driven by gaps in data collection, research funding, clinical practice guidelines and health-care delivery systems. The report emphasizes that improving data accuracy, increasing research funding for women-specific conditions and enhancing sex-based clinical guidelines could significantly reduce these disparities.
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