Women's health innovators and investors share their thoughts on trends - both positive and challenging - for 2025

We're behind men's health research by a century, but these innovators and investors say 2025 is the year women take ownership over healthcare access and care.

In this article from Forbes, more than a dozen women's health innovators and investors from over 10 companies share thoughts on trends - both positive and challenging - for 2025.

That represents a gigantic leap for women. In 1986, NIH established a policy that encouraged—but not required—researchers to include women in medical research. Yes: less than 40 years ago. You’d think women hadn’t been around until then, much less that we were half of the population. (Women? I haven’t seen any. Have you??)

Before then, conducting research with women was just so complicated. Pregnancy, you know, and all those hormones. Easier to just assume we were small men and move on. It wasn’t until 2001—only 23 years ago—that the NIH Institute of Medicine formally declared that men and women were different biologically (astounding!!) and “should be studied as a variable in clinical research”—rather than lumping men and a few women today in a study and applying the results to everyone. (Yes, I get a bit wired up about all this, but the actual, factual history of how men became ‘normal’ and women…not…is even worse reading. Here you go: “Why we know so little about women’s health.” And go to CHAT to tell us your favorite rant on this!)

Bottom line today: we know a lot more about men’s innards, how they work, and how things can be drugged, patched and fixed up than than we know about women’s, and we keep applying that default male research to women, harming many and leaving both providers and women beyond frustrated. Without our having been aware of it, men are the default for everything from calculating drug doses to recognizing heart attack symptoms to designing and testing car safety features. (And don’t get me started on office furniture design!)

Basically, women’s health research is behind men’s by a century of effort.

But by 2024, the pieces were in place to leapfrog much of that, to go straight from drumbeats in the forest to digital tech…IF we can hold on to what we’ve achieved. That’s not necessarily a given. For instance, as the article notes, “50% of counties in the US don’t have OBGYNs, new reproductive health regulations are further restricting access to care, and there is a massive education gap” about what already exists for women, let alone what is possible.

But if we can hang on to the progress we’ve made, women's health founders and investors—a critical piece—predict that 2025 will be the year that women take ownership over healthcare and advocate for the access and care that we need.