While it is well known that women live longer lives on average, it is much less known that they spend 25% more years in poor health. This is what we call the women’s health gap, and it affects women, the children and parents and others they care for, and the economy. By addressing the root causes of the women’s health gap – and it is addressable – we have the opportunity to unlock an average of 7 additional days of higher quality life annually for the 3.9 billion women worldwide.
Because the majority of the women’s health gap falls during the working years of a woman’s life, this would equate to at least $1 trillion of global GDP by 2040 from greater productivity, and is the equivalent of 137 million full-time jobs.
In a new global report by the McKinsey Health Institute in collaboration with the World Economic Forum, my colleagues Lucy Pérez, Anouk Petersen, Valentina Sartori and I put data to the women’s health gap. We assessed the 64 conditions that account for almost 86% of the female global disease burden in total (excluding injuries). Contrary to common misperception, only 5% of the women’s health burden stems from sexual and reproductive health, while nearly half of the burden comes from health conditions that are more prevalent or manifest differently in women, such as headache disorders or autoimmune disease.
On a global basis, the gender health gap varies from 15 – 40% more years in poor health. The US is at 18% more years for women vs. men spent in poor health. The mix of what drives the women’s health gap varies, and in low- and medium-income countries it is driven more by poor maternal health and high rates of death in childbirth.
So how can we close the women’s health gap given the significant life and economic opportunity at stake? Six main things can help: increase sex-specific access to care, close gender-based research gaps, improve sex-specific data on diseases, close the gender under-investment gap in solutions, support policies that advance women’s health, and increase awareness of the gap. Each of these six elements can help reinforce each other, and there is a virtuous cycle that could significantly improve progress.
Whether you are a woman interested in issues that affect your health and your family’s wellbeing, or a leader in an organization who could take action to close the gender health gap, or a political leader who could help shape policies – everybody has a role to play in closing the gender health gap.
The first pillar is sex-specific access to care and treatment. Differences in care delivery make up a third of the women’s health gap. A woman might be discharged during a heart attack, have a worsening health condition attributed to “stress,” or find it challenging to receive a diagnosis. For example, an analyses of US health records and studies indicate that fewer than half of women living with endometriosis have a documented diagnosis. Other studies have indicated that women are often diagnosed later than men for certain cancers and diabetes.
The second and third pillar of gender-based research and sex-specific data on diseases are strongly related to each other. We found that in more than 650 research papers, only half offered sex-disaggregated data. It’s hard to know how medicine, treatment, or care affects men or women differently when there is no data to break that down. Of the half of the 650 research papers that did show sex-disaggregated data, two thirds showed a disadvantage for women, a quarter were equal across genders, and 10% of the papers showed a disadvantage for men. Clearly, understanding how medicine or treatment affects women specifically is important to improve care.
The fourth pillar is the business case to spur greater investment in discovering treatments and delivering sex-appropriate care for women’s health conditions. Conditions for women often have fewer treatments or assets being developed. This is also true for women-specific conditions such as polycystic ovarian syndrome, menopause, endometriosis, or uterine fibroids. It’s also worthwhile to recognize that there also are budget-conscious solutions with potentially huge impact to save lives.
For example, UNICEF’s Côte d’Ivoire Country Office, produced a low-cost version of a uterine balloon tamponade device to treat postpartum hemorrhage, a condition involving heavy bleeding in childbirth that kills 130,000 women globally each year. The product, which uses a catheter and a condom, has a 95% success rate and has been scaled nationally.
The fifth pillar of closing the gender health gap is advocating for policies that advance women’s health—for example updated training in medical schools to recognize more gender health differences, or insurance policies that requires coverage of hormone replacement for menopause treatment. The final pillar is about awareness—spreading awareness so that more of us know and can act.
The economic case for closing the women’s health gap is strong, and creating better women’s health outcomes improves the lives of women as well as the lives of their families and communities.
Addressing the women’s health gap improves lives and livelihoods.
