By the Numbers: 10 Challenges Facing Women & Women’s Health
For this year’s International Women’s Day post, Avestria is highlighting specific challenges facing women, women’s health, and female founders: one for each number from 10 to 1.
10:
Nearly 10% (9.5%) of women under 65 did not have health insurance in 2021. Being uninsured can have financial and physical costs, including lack of access to preventative tests and screenings, which, in turn, decrease the likelihood of early diagnoses and positive prognoses.
Health insurance might also be a prerequisite for clinical trial participation. Without women, especially non-white women, in these trials, tested medical products will likely favor white men.
9:
Over 90% (94.5%) of U.S. medical school students believed sex and gender differences in medicine should be included in their education. But only 43% of students thought their curriculum helped them understand those differences, and only 34.5% felt prepared to manage sex and gender differences in a healthcare setting.
8:
Women’s rates of lung cancer, their leading cause of cancer death, have increased 80% over the past 40 years.
Over 50% of women with lung cancer are non-smokers — yet lung cancer screening guidelines still capture only smoking history, leaving non-smoking women at risk for a late diagnosis and, subsequently, a low survival rate.
7:
Almost 70 years (67 years) have passed since the first large-scale trial of the birth control pill. During it, women noted side effects like blood clots, headaches, and nausea, but they were considered “unreliable historians”, and their concerns were dismissed.
The birth control pill, one of the most common contraceptives, still has various side effects — but women don’t have another effective birth control option, like men’s condoms, that won’t potentially affect their emotional and physical health.
6:
About six months have passed since the creation of the female car crash test dummy. Currently, car companies’ crash test regimes require tests on only male — not male and female — dummies. The few female dummies previously available — though, again, not required — were just scaled-down versions of male dummies; they didn’t represent how women, on average, are smaller and lighter, have broader hips and wider pelvises, and sit closer to the wheel than men. Women are also 17% more likely to die in a car crash and 73% more likely to sustain serious injuries in front-end collisions than men are.
The new female dummy represents about the 50th percentile of women in height and 25th percentile in weight: the best representation of the average female since crash tests started in 1970.
5:
Health conditions that affect only females can be grouped into about five buckets: cancer (ovarian and cervical), gynecological (includes menstruation, urinary tract health, and uterine fibroids), infertility-related (includes endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome, and uterine fibroids), pregnancy-related (includes breastfeeding, pregnancy loss, and prenatal and postpartum care), and other (includes chromosomal and neurological disorders like Turner Syndrome and Rett Syndrome respectively).
No cures currently exist for issues ranging from endometriosis (which affects one of every 10 females) to polycystic ovary syndrome (one of every five to 25 females) to Rett Syndrome (one of every 10,000–15,000 females).
Even for ubiquitous conditions, like menopause, treatments are still lacking. Nearly 80% of medical residents feel “barely comfortable” discussing or treating menopause; as a result, 75% of women who ask for help in managing their menopause symptoms don’t receive it.
4:
Osteoporosis is four times more common in women than men. One main reason for this difference is that women’s estrogen production decreases after menopause, causing them to lose bone density.
Women can lose up to 20% of their bone density in the five to seven years following menopause — and every 10% drop in bone density increases their risk of fracture by two to three times. In fact, half of women over 50 years old will suffer from an osteoporotic fracture.
3:
Cardiovascular health is the top morality cause for women, killing one in every three women. But only 38% of participants in cardiovascular clinical trials are women and only 28% of clinical trials analyze data by biological sex. As a result, men’s typical heart attack symptoms (chest pain or pressure, shortness of breath, and lightheadedness) — not women’s symptoms (chest pain but also flu-like fatigue, nausea, night sweats, and stomach pain) — are considered “typical” for a heart attack. Due to this male bias in education, trials, and understanding, women are 50% more likely both to receive the wrong diagnosis after a heart attack and to die the year following their heart attack than men are.
2:
Under 2% (1.9%) of venture capital funding went to female founders in 2022. (The highest funding percent they ever received was about 2.8% in 2019). Not funding women has an outsized impact on women’s health companies since 70–80% of women’s health company founders are female.
1:
According to PitchBook Data, only about 1% of all venture capital healthcare funding goes to women’s health companies.
Funding to women’s health companies is increasing: for example, Maven Health become the first digital health unicorn focused on women’s health in 2022, and Elvie, Kindbody, and Tia had some of the largest fundraising rounds for women’s health companies ever. However, the overall funding remains insignificant.
Women are 80% of the healthcare workforce, make 80% of household healthcare decisions, and spend 29% more per-capita on healthcare than men. Seeing women as a market — as workers, decision-makers, and patients — and meeting their needs thus has a ripple effect, affecting not just individual women but those who rely on them for healthcare: professionally, personally, or both.⚕️
We hope that celebrations of this year’s International Women’s Day will lead to action, specifically increased investment in women’s health and female founders. Be sure to check out Avestria’s International Women’s Day posts for 2020 and 2021 and follow us on this blog, and our website, LinkedIn, and Twitter for more.
