We live in an era of fast-moving, interconnected crises — from antimicrobial resistance and climate-related health threats to pandemics. Yet, many health systems remain ill-equipped to respond, while also struggling with aging populations, workforce constraints, and the growing pressure to adapt to increasingly complex and rapidly changing conditions.
To address systemic flaws, as well as current and future challenges, more agile and resilient health systems are required — and innovation is vital. Investing in innovation throughout the value chain strengthens not only health outcomes, but also wider resilience and broader economic stability, national security, and sustainable growth. This is because innovation provides tools — clinical, digital, and organizational — that enable rapid adaptation and a proactive, preventative approach to health challenges.
With the growing use of data and frontier technologies, digital tools are rapidly becoming central to modern healthcare. One such tool is the newly launched Women’s Health Innovation Radar — developed by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with the Kearney Health Institute, the Gates Foundation and Wellcome Leap — which maps where scientific evidence and investment are concentrated, where structural gaps persist and how these limitations impede equitable innovation in women’s health.
Women’s health offers a prime example of some of the problems facing traditional health services, and the transformative effect innovation can have on the science-to-patient journey. In already strained health systems, attention to the disease burden that specifically affects women’s health is being crowded out.
Yet, women’s health is not “just” about women. It affects everyone, and making strides to improve women’s health offers a huge, untapped social and economic opportunity. Beyond the benefit to the women in question, it is estimated that improving women’s health could yield 75 million disability-adjusted life years annually and boost annual global GDP by $1 trillion by 2040.
A key element of making health systems more resilient is data. Data plays a huge role in transforming uncertainty into foresight and a better ability to manage risk. The astute use of the right data coupled with digital tools is helping improve the patient journey, supporting forecasting, diagnosis, decision-making and engagement.
It is no surprise, therefore, that data analysis is at the heart of the radar. By studying data from 2016 to 2025 for 10 high-impact conditions, the radar has highlighted challenges in three areas — funding allocation, evidence gathering and translation into products.
The radar’s findings reveal that just one-fifth of all health R&D goes toward the study of women’s health conditions. Exacerbating this is the fact that where funding is available, more than half is concentrated in two areas — ovarian cancer and menopause. As a result, other women-specific conditions, such as ischemic heart disease and premenstrual syndrome, receive little investment relative to their burden, and substantially less funding than men-specific conditions, such as prostate cancer.
On the evidence side, clinical validation specific to women is underdeveloped. Beyond the historic preponderance of research focused on male biology, there is little research into sex-specific differences — currently, fewer than 2%–3% of clinical trials are women-specific. As a result, we know little about how different diseases both manifest and respond to treatment in women. Exacerbating the situation is the fact that even where science is generated, it fails to consistently progress to human validation.
Typically, it is only conditions that receive greater investment and research that are more likely to progress to product development. Additionally, where scientific innovation occurs, there is often a failure to convert this into solutions that can be scaled. Anxiety programs highlight this shortfall. While the radar identified 112 pipeline programs, just four products were launched during the 10-year review timeline.
Worse still, these three problems reinforce one another. The system shows no signs of self-correcting, suggesting that without deliberate alignment between funding and the female disease burden, innovation — and with it, funding patterns — will continue to reflect historical priorities rather than the areas of greatest need.
Fortunately, the radar is identifying priority areas for accelerated development and targeted investment. This ability to identify challenges from the start of the process is what makes the radar valuable.
But wider support is required. Broader health system transformation reveals that to develop a resilient innovation system, collaboration — cross-sector as well as local and national — is fundamental. Strong, visionary leadership is also required, supported by policy and regulatory agility, to enable innovation that is both safe and scalable.
The radar has already highlighted the need to radically change the entire innovation route from funding allocation to clinical evidence, late-stage development, and commercialization. Therefore, strengthening the business case for women’s health innovation is crucial.
Institutionalizing women-focused evidence would help support this transition, lifting constraints to both scientific understanding and the ability to translate research into practice. Market potential, regulatory clarity and returns influence investment, and the radar provides a foundation for transparency and a more informed and coordinated approach.
Ultimately, what is good for women’s health is good for everyone. Understanding the full scope of that opportunity is how we ensure science translates into solutions women have long been waiting for.
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