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ON WOMEN’S HEALTH
Improving women’s health could improve the world’s economy
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| Being in good health means being unconstrained by physical, social, mental, or spiritual challenges that get in the way of being at your very best. Recent research from the McKinsey Health Institute indicates that men spend more time in good health than women do. This is what’s called the women’s health gap.
What’s behind this disparity? One reason is that women often aren’t treated in a way that reflects female biology. In the past, women’s health was equated with maternal and child health or, more broadly, sexual and reproductive health. That was based on the mistaken assumption that women were just smaller men, differentiated only by their reproductive organs.
It is now understood that female biology is different from male biology—beyond the reproductive system. This realization has led to more awareness of how some diseases manifest differently in women than in men and how addressing those differences can result in better health and economic outcomes.
Heart attacks, for example, tend to manifest in men as pressure on the left side of the chest and a weak or numb left arm. In women, they could also present as nausea, dizziness, or a feeling that something is off but you can’t quite pinpoint what. When a woman shows up to the ER with these symptoms, the doctor there may not have been trained to recognize that heart attacks may manifest differently in women. As a result, women are often sent home with medicine for their nausea, instead of being treated for a heart attack.
Data on why conditions manifest differently in men and women is lacking, which contributes to the health gap in multiple ways. For one, less data leads to less investment. When you’re spending upward of $1 billion to develop a drug, you want the best understanding of everything, including biological mechanisms, physiology, and genetics. The uterus is one of the least understood organs in the human body, even though almost half of the world’s population has one. A more limited understanding of how this organ works means it is riskier to develop drugs for conditions that affect it. So it’s not too surprising that uterine cancer is one of the top conditions contributing to the women’s health gap in the United States.
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| | | “Our research shows that closing the women’s health gap could boost the global economy by $1 trillion annually by 2040.” | | | | |
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| | | | Lucy Pérez is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Boston office and an affiliated leader of the McKinsey Health Institute. | | |
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