Women drive the healthcare economy. They make about 80% of healthcare decisions for their families, spend more out-of-pocket, and use medical services more frequently than men. By 2030, women are projected to control about $34 trillion in U.S. wealth, giving them unprecedented influence over where healthcare investment dollars flow. Yet, women’s health remains one of the most undercapitalized segments of the healthcare industry.

A new report from Women’s Health Access Matters (WHAM), The Business Case for Accelerating Women’s Health Investment, quantifies that disconnect: an estimated $360 billion global “ghost market” in conditions that affect women differently or disproportionately. Those markets have been hiding in plain sight, generating massive healthcare costs and consumer demand but little targeted investment.

“What was once viewed as a niche sector continued to mature throughout 2025, even amid broader market pressure,” Carolee Lee, founder and CEO of WHAM, told me in a Zoom interview.

How A $360 Billion Market Hid In Plain Sight

For decades, “women’s health” was defined narrowly as gynecology, pregnancy, and fertility—what medical historians now call the “bikini medicine” era. That framing ignored the rest of the female body and reduced half the population to reproductive organs.

The intellectual shift began in 1985, when the U.S. Public Health Service Task Force on Women’s Health Issues challenged medicine to recognize that women experience disease across all organ systems and at every stage of life. That work led to the three-part framework now used by the National Institutes of Health, some venture capitalists: Conditions that affect women uniquely, disproportionately, or differently. Congress reinforced it in the 1990s when women were finally required to be included in federally funded clinical trials.

That taxonomy is now embedded in government science. Not so much in venture capital.

“Gynecological conditions represent less than 5% of the market,” Lee said. “So the opportunity is the other 95%. That’s why we keep honing in on differently, disproportionately, and exclusively—because if we’re not talking the same language, then we’re going past each other.”

That broader definition is what turns a Silicon Valley Bank estimate of a 5% market into a 95% blind spot. Most of the money tied to women’s health is spent on heart disease, brain health, autoimmune disorders, cancer, and aging—not in fertility clinics.

The dollars were never missing. They were misclassified.

Why Venture Capital Missed 95% Of The Health of Women’s Market

Once women’s health became shorthand for reproduction, capital followed suit. Investors constructed benchmarks, market maps, and exit expectations based on a small slice of what women actually spend on healthcare.

At the same time, decades of male-default medical data distorted the modeling of risk and return. Women were excluded from most clinical trials until the early 1990s. As a result, drugs, devices, and even modern AI systems were trained on incomplete data that failed to capture how women experience disease or respond to treatment.

That distortion shows up commercially. In adtech and algorithmic systems, which routinely suppress women’s health content, making startups look smaller and weaker than they are. High customer acquisition costs and shadowbanned campaigns become “proof” of limited demand.

Lee sees the same feedback loop. “Success breeds success,” she said. “And we’re just starting to see it.”

For years, there were too few visible wins to reset investor behavior. That is now changing.

Capital Is Growing—But Still Dramatically Lagging

Women’s health venture investment has more than tripled since 2020. In 2024, about $2.6 billion went directly into women’s health companies, and roughly $10.7 billion when conditions that disproportionately affect women are included. That represents a 55% increase in just a few years.

Yet, women’s health still receives only about 2.3% of all healthcare venture capital.

That divergence—fast growth, low allocation—is what an early-stage opportunity looks like.

The Return On Investment Wall Street Can No Longer Ignore

WHAM’s economic case is clear: Research focused on just four women-impacted conditions—Alzheimer’s disease, coronary artery disease, lung cancer, and rheumatoid arthritis—generated about $14 billion in economic returns from $350 million in investment. That is a forty-to-one payoff.

Closing the broader women’s health outcome gap could add more than $1 trillion to global GDP by 2040 and unlock about $400 billion in annual economic impact through reduced healthcare costs, increased workforce participation, and improved productivity.

“We have the data. It’s not about the data,” Lee said.

Pharmaceutical revenue already reflects this reality. More than 60% of the largest drug companies’ sales come from conditions that affect women uniquely, disproportionately, or differently. Yet, only about 4% of their development pipelines are designed around female biology.

That is not a science problem. It is a valuation problem.

The Inflection Point Is Finally Here

Two forces are now pushing the market to correct.

The first is regulation. The Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health now require sex-disaggregated data, diversity action plans for clinical trials, and the use of female animal models in preclinical research. Ignoring sex differences is no longer just bad medicine. It is a regulatory risk.

A recent federal appeals court ruling blocking proposed cuts to National Institutes of Health funding preserved the financial backbone of U.S. biomedical research, protecting long-term women’s health studies that depend on stable, multi-year federal investment.

The second is exits. In late 2025, Blackstone and TPG announced an $18.3 billion acquisition of Hologic, one of the largest healthcare buyouts in years. Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi, and AbbVie have collectively spent more than $26 billion on acquisitions in neurology, oncology, and autoimmune diseases, all areas in which women bear a disproportionate disease burden.

“When private equity comes in, that changes things,” Lee said.

The Great Wealth Transfer will accelerate the shift. As women gain control of trillions of dollars in assets, healthcare spending and investment priorities will increasingly follow their needs.

Why This Market Will Not Go Back To Being Invisible

The three-category framework did not invent new diseases. It revealed who has been carrying the burden for those we already treat.

“It’s not women’s health,” Lee said. “It’s the health of women.”

Markets do not fail because demand is weak. They fail when categories are wrong. For decades, women’s health was boxed into a 5% corner of the healthcare economy. The other 95%—heart disease, brain health, autoimmune disease, cancer, aging—was always there.

Now, investors are finally recognizing the opportunity that the health of women represents.