Investors are watching virtual women's healthcare. Here's why.

Another Maryann, this one of FemmeHealth Ventures, does a terrific job looking at women's health venture capital despite certain 'get thee back to the kitchen' vibes from DC.

[No time for context? Click here to skip to (the other) Maryann’s FemmeHealth Ventures excellent post.]

Since about 2023, we’ve been sitting right on the edge of women finally getting the gender-specific medical research and healthcare that’s been missing for a long, long time.

Marketing data verified at least 20 years ago that women make 80% of healthcare decisions for everyone around them: aging parents, kids, partners and spouses. that’s why we at Women Untamed refer to women as the Family Chief Medical Officers.

When I was VP of a health system, advertising free prostatic cancer screening to men got no one knocking at the door. Advertise it to women to keep their men safe, and the women dragged the men in. But to get to that point of gender-specific marketing—what women see, hear and read—I spent months educating our receptive but male-dominated marketing team on how healthcare consumer decision-making really works. Once they figured it out, we went from 13% market share to 52% very quickly.

If you’re a man, you think the world is ruled by men. If you’re a woman…well, you likely have a different perspective. I used to smile at the octogenarian philanthropists making announcements about investments. The man usually made the announcement, with the wife smiling in the background…the same wife everyone had been supporting for months to assist her in getting her husband to the announcement of the day.

That previously back-stage decision-making is now front-stage, and it’s key to understanding what’s going on in both medical research and venture capital in women’s health right now, and why doors are finally opening. Maybe.

Both medical research and venture capital investments have long been dominated by men, but that’s changed, while other societal and culture changes were also occurring. And in healthcare research, women’s health research finally got a foothold in the 2020s.

Back in 2001 when the NIH Institute of Medicine (IOM) announced women are biologically different than men (good to know), their recommendation to finally include women in medical research was groundbreaking. Historically, medical studies had excluded female participants; research data was collected from men and generalized to women—the “women are just littler men” theory.

But if you didn’t know that—if the absence of women in research was the air you breathed—no one knew differently or expected anything different in healthcare findings. So, for instance, tonight you might be taking Trazodone for sleep without knowing the (very old) safety studies were done primarily on men or people who had dementia, or that the safety risk of Trazodone is likely significantly greater for women than men.

Women are also curious and unafraid to show we don’t know something. We seek information more than men. Women use the Internet more than men generally, seeking information, particularly for health information. And now women have rapidly adapted digital devices that give us instant health information or help us communicate with providers.

Because we’re also impatient for that information. We don’t want it a week later when an appointment at the doctor opens up—the same doctor who is desperately trying to catch up on the latest research studies, only 25% of which actually include women—still. In other words, the same primary care providers—family doctors and internists—who have largely been trained on men’s health, never mind women are half the population, less afraid to use healthcare, and pay billions more for it every year than men. We need it at 2 am when the kids have a temp of 104, or in the early morning when we’re sorting out our day or figuring out if the kids need to stay home and disrupt everyone else’s day.

And we have our own money these days. Women now control 52% of wealth, expected to grow to an estimated two-thirds by 2030.

Bottom line: women are half the population; dominate healthcare decision-making; actively seek information, particularly online; and now have their own money. As such, we represent a huge under-tapped and underdeveloped direct, gender-specific healthcare market.

While investing in women’s health isn’t my wheelhouse, I’ve lurked with interest for years, watching start-ups like MavenClinic, a virtual healthcare provider for women and families. They’ve been intriguing from start-up to where they are now, partnering with client partners like Morgan Stanley, Boston Scientific and several of the Blues. Maven Clinic has raised over $425 million in funding from multiple investors; they’re smart, adaptive, well-rooted, and on the way to more.

In the meantime, things seemed to be looking better on research funding to support better women’s healthcare. Yes, we’re now more than 20 years from the IOM recommendation to include women in research. But in healthcare, it takes an average of 17 years for research findings like the IOM recommendation to change clinical care, so the long wait wasn’t a real surprise. After all, we’re talking significant culture change, not just a seemingly simple diagnostic or treatment recommendation. What finally happened:

• In 2023, then-President Biden announced the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research.

• In 2024, in his State of the of the Union address, Biden followed up, laying out his vision for transforming women’s health research to improve women's lives.

• And in March 2024, he used an Executive Order (EO) to request the NIH direct $12B for research to women’s health, with the NIH “poised to perform.” When that kind of money hits the deck, it spurs interest in both public and private investment.

While we were waiting, from 2004 to 2022, there was also a big boost in women in healthcare, with 97% increase in women in medicine. Four out of ten doctors are now women. Primary care specialties like OB-Gyn, family practice and internal medicine were becoming dominated by women, who were asking questions about women’s health and not finding research-based answers. When your patient finds out more from the Internet about menopause than you can offer in the office, it’s time to push for change.

Not coincidentally, Deloitte noted in early 2024 that “Although venture funding in the overall health tech market fell 27% between 2022 and 2023, investments in innovators focused on women’s health grew 5%, marking a difference of 32 percentage points.”

By 2024, more women with unanswered questions were finally in medical research and medical practice; women’s health tech was taking off; and now it looked like research funding was, too. All this kicked interest in women’s health into high gear, including among investors. For investment in women’s health, 2024 was “transformational.”

And then…the election

Of course, the problem with EOs like Biden’s focusing on $12B for women’s health research is that EOs are not law and can be reversed with a new EO. Minutes after his inauguration, now-president Trump did exactly that, reversing over 80 Biden EOs, including just about anything to do with gender or racial equity. He immediately did away with a Biden EO on reproductive health access; expect to see more on that when Congress takes up renewal of the ACA later in 2025. Trump has already proposed limiting the ACA enrollment period that doesn’t even start until November. The ACA ("Obamacare) has been a burr in his fur for years, and I’m expecting Congress to find the ACA’s record support for women’s health—like free mammography and birth control—is “too expensive” to continue.

As for this administration’s commitment to women’s health, I’d like to show you the original announcement about the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, but it’s been scrubbed from the WH website. Although if you hurry, you may still find it elsewhere.

We finally had a push in the Biden administration to greatly expand women’s health research with related increased interest in the private sector. But now we have a president not known for his feminist tendencies. More worrisome to many of us, we also have a vice president and a secretary of defense (and likely others) echoing a movement referred to as the “TheoBros.” Remember “childless cat ladies?” That particular dog whistle is the tip of the TheoBros iceberg.

Sensing a wobble in the universe on women’s health research and care,¹ I wondered if there was any backpedaling on what I’d seen as some great positive movement in investor interest in women’s health last year. I e-chatted about that with another Maryann, who is also on Substack as Femme Health Ventures, to find out what she’s seeing. Venture capital funding investing in women’s health is definitely her wheelhouse.

With 20 years in financial services, Maryann is a private banking and investment advisor to ultra-high-net-worth individuals and angel investors. She connects female founders to capital. Here’s her take…

Femtech’s $1T opportunity: Why Investors Are Watching Virtual Women’s Health

Thanks, Maryann—and thanks particularly for what you do!

1. Now AKA DEI research and care.