Beyond the trillion-dollar headline: The new era of women’s health
For several years, the conversation about women’s health at conferences such as the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference has focused on making the business case for investment. Prior research from the McKinsey Health Institute has shown the staggering scale of the opportunity: MHI’s flagship report, created in partnership with the World Economic Forum, found that closing the women’s health gap could add over $1 trillion to the global economy annually by 2040.
But for many CEOs and healthcare leaders, a trillion-dollar figure can still feel too abstract to shape quarterly strategy. That is why the McKinsey Health Institute’s work has gone beyond quantifying the opportunity to articulating a clear blueprint for action. At this year’s conference, the narrative further built on that foundation: the conversation has moved decisively from aspiration to what Lucy Pérez, a McKinsey senior partner and McKinsey Health Institute leader, calls the action stage, where the focus has moved from why we should care to how we scale.
We are squarely in the action stage. The focus has moved from ‘why we should care’ to ‘how we scale.’
For the forward-looking executive, the answer lies in connecting evidence, economics, and operating models—moving past the “small men fallacy” in R&D, overcoming systemic barriers to care, and capturing the massive, underserved market for women’s health.
Bridging the R&D chasm
For decades, medical research has treated women as “small men,” a bias that has created chasms in our understanding of how diseases—from cardiovascular to Alzheimer’s—uniquely manifest in female biology. “We don’t have minor gaps; we have chasms in our understanding of women’s health. It’s time. Women have waited long enough,” noted Regina Dugan, CEO of Wellcome Leap and former director of DARPA.
To bridge this gap, organizations are adopting high-speed innovation models that prioritize radical urgency. Wellcome Leap is deploying a DARPA-style model—investing $250 million in women's health with 30-day funding cycles and three-year goals—to move from basic research to investable advances in years rather than decades. Her approach extends to deeply neglected areas, from halving stillbirth rates and reducing the average five-year delay in diagnosing heavy menstrual bleeding to accelerating progress in Alzheimer’s disease by tackling sex-specific biology and earlier, more precise detection, where women bear a disproportionate burden yet remain underrepresented in research.
As Anita Zaidi, president of gender equality at the Gates Foundation, pointed out, “The opportunity space for women’s health R&D is incredible. The demand is there, and we have to meet women where they are.” Reflecting this urgency, the Gates Foundation has committed $2.5 billion through 2030 to advance more than 40 innovations in areas of women's health, such as preeclampsia and nonhormonal contraception, that have lacked research for half a century.
“The chasms in our understanding and in care are so large that we need substantial breakthroughs to solve them,” said Molly Bode, a McKinsey partner, noting the need for catalytic capital and cross-sector collaboration to meet that demand and translate innovation into impact.
Biopharma’s opportunity
Recent MHI research highlights a significant opportunity for biopharma to drive growth not only through new assets but by unlocking more value from existing portfolios through a deeper understanding of sex-based differences across diseases and treatments. Many therapies already target conditions that affect women uniquely, differently, or disproportionately, yet remain developed and commercialized with male biology as the default, limiting efficacy, adoption, and market reach. Addressing this gap creates a powerful lever for optimizing existing assets.
As Philip Breesch explained, Chiesi rigorously maps the full patient journey—prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and beyond—across different conditions to identify where women are underserved and where investments can make a real impact for women and, often, their newborns. Importantly, designing therapies that account for sex-based differences does not benefit women alone; it leads to more precise, safer, and more effective treatments for everyone—improving outcomes for women as well as men by aligning prevention, diagnosis, and treatment strategies with sex-specific biology. This approach shows how incorporating sex-based differences across R&D, clinical development, and commercialization can drive both better outcomes and durable growth.
AI and the two-for-one clinical strategy
One of the most immediate opportunities for healthtech and biopharma leaders is to integrate AI into existing screening infrastructure. Rather than requiring entirely new patient behaviors, innovators are finding ways to extract secondary, life-saving data from routine procedures. For example, cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of death among women in the United States, yet it often presents differently than in men. Traditional screenings often miss the microvascular markers common in women.
GE HealthCare is deploying technology that leverages AI to detect arterial calcification in the breast during routine mammograms. Jyoti Gupta of GE HealthCare discussed how women detected with these calcifications in routine mammograms are up to two times more likely to eventually suffer cardiac events, so a standard cancer screening can also be a heart-health screening. This approach addresses the traditional fragmentation of care—treating the woman as a whole patient—while maximizing the return on investment (ROI) of existing diagnostics.
Capturing the midlife peak
Healthcare systems have historically been episodic, and women often don’t receive the preventive care they need, representing a $50 billion opportunity for US health systems. Data from the McKinsey Health Institute also shows a peak in disease-specific burden between the ages of 35 and 65—when many women may drop out of systematic care as their engagement with OB-GYN declines.
The Cleveland Clinic is addressing this midlife gap with its Women’s Comprehensive Health and Research Center, as Beri Ridgeway explained. The innovation is as much about the operating model as it is about clinical care. To scale access, the clinic uses virtual shared medical appointments, conducting sessions for groups of patients who submit a validated questionnaire in advance. This allows providers to deliver high-quality education and triage on menopause and bone health while maintaining individual follow-ups.
Predictive data: The ROI of maternal health
For CEOs in the insurance and provider sectors, a strong opportunity for investment is the immediate reduction in high-cost adverse events through predictive analytics.
Unified Women’s Healthcare’s Paul Kusserow shared a compelling case study showing how they use data to identify high-risk pregnancies before the end of the first trimester. By incorporating value-based care models for Medicaid patients and using these early interventions, they have seen four times more pregnancies identified in the first trimester, a 10 percent reduction in NICU stays, and a 10 percent decrease in severe maternal morbidity. This demonstrates that when reliable data informs safe, timely decisions, financial performance and patient outcomes align.
The leadership imperative
What has become unmistakably clear is that women’s health has not been held back by a lack of passion or good intent—it has been constrained by a lack of system-level focus, accountability, and follow-through. The discussion underscored that success in this sector also depends on who is making the decisions and how well they understand the patient. Too often, women, who drive the vast majority of household healthcare decisions, have not been meaningfully represented in executive leadership or boardrooms shaping these strategies. As Kusserow emphasized, companies whose management teams and boards better reflect their customer base have been shown to be twice as profitable, reinforcing that representation is not only an equity imperative but a performance one that he has seen first-hand.
Closing the women’s health gap is no longer just about proving a trillion-dollar theory. It is about investing and redesigning care to drive better health outcomes, greater productivity, and stronger economic growth.
Perspectives for this session were provided by Lucy Pérez, Molly Bode, and Megan Greenfield of McKinsey; Anita Zaidi of the Gates Foundation; Regina Dugan of Wellcome Leap; Beri Ridgeway of Cleveland Clinic; Jyoti Gupta of GE HealthCare; Paul Kusserow of Unified Women’s Healthcare; and Philip Breesch of Chiesi.
To learn more about the opportunity for impact and action in women’s health, visit McKinsey.com to continue to #countstudycareincludeinvestwomen.
Postscript: As if to underscore the “action stage,” news broke on day two of the conference that exits in the women’s health sector—including acquisitions and IPOs—have totaled more than $100 billion over the past 25 years. With nearly half of those exits occurring since 2020, the category is no longer niche; it is an accelerating, strategically vital market.