Melinda France Gate says women’s long-term health care is underfunded.

Billionaire philanthropist Melinda French Gates said women’s health was long underfunded because she was committed to researching the issue.

This is part of her guarantee of $1 billion in the field over two years and will be used in new research to pose significant risks to women around the world, including autoimmune status and mental health.

about 80% of people with autoimmune diseases are womenAccording to Xavier University School of Medicine, depression is about 1.5 times common According to the World Health Organization, among men around the world, men among women.

The study will also focus on cardiovascular disease. While this is a health issue for both men and women, it may have a different impact on them.

Women are more likely to have worse outcomes after a heart attack and experience higher complications and mortality rates, which are often due to delayed diagnosis, delayed diagnosis, timely treatment and symptoms compared to men. European Society of Cardiology.

Gates’s Pivotal Ventures organization will be granted to Wellcome Leap, a U.S. non-governmental organization founded by Wellcome Trust, which will fund new research.

However, critics believe it is a long way to go to address decades of long-term underfunding and funding to fund women’s health research with other medical fields.

Historically, women’s health research has been underfunded and underreported to treat the male body as the default.

In the United States, Between 1977 and 1993, women of childbearing age were mostly excluded from early clinical drug trials. While this policy is largely a protective response, as children have severe birth defects when taking thalidomide during pregnancy, it also leads to women being systematically excluded from clinical drug trials, leaving a gap in their knowledge about how the drug affects them.

even Female rodents are often excluded from the testas researchers worry that hormone changes will complicate data analysis.

According to 2019, women represented about 42% of participants in clinical trials of cancer, cardiovascular and mental illness. Harvard Medical School.

Wellcome Leap is one of the world’s largest health research networks, which includes over 160 institutions on six continents, including countries such as South Africa, Nigeria, Rwanda, Guatemala, Brazil, Singapore, Japan and Australia.

“The long-term underfunded women’s health, and after long-term inadequate research, and therefore not fully understood,” said Melinda France Gate. She added that she hopes we can see progress “even decades, faster than we do with other methods … the results will touch the lives of women around the world.”

Although they live longer than men, women still face significant health inequality.

The 2024 health report by consulting firm McKinsey found that women spent on average nine years in poor health compared to men.

It said the difference was related to their lack of historical numbers in the study and a higher likelihood of being misdiagnosed. It concluded that this underinvestment has left key areas of women’s health overlooked.

“We need more breakthroughs, we need faster speeds,” added Regina Dugan, CEO of Wellcome Leap. “Women have been waiting long enough.”

According to Alzheimer’s society, Wellcome Leap has promised to help reduce the lifelong risk of Alzheimer’s, a degenerative disease in women, that is, a degenerative disease that women are twice as likely to develop as men, by studying whether hormone therapy may have a protective effect on brain health and potentially reduce the risk or degenerative decline in Alzheimer’s disease.

However, some frontline workers say such high-profile Western funding models may sometimes end up bypassing them.

Serley Eises, executive director of the Windhoek Lidar Community Foundation in Namibia, which works with vulnerable women and girls, said that due to the lack of publicity for its organization, there was no funding from Western donors.

She told the BBC that she believes that “the lasting impact on women’s mental health comes from investing in grassroots, community-led organizations that provide safe spaces, psychosocial care, and practical opportunities for education and income”.

A Wellcome Leap spokesman told the BBC they worked with local teams in thirty countries.

“These programs are designed to generate breakthroughs that can be implemented in collaboration with researchers, clinicians, and grassroots organizations.”

According to the World Economic Forum and McKinsey, closing the gap in women’s health is not just a moral command—it is also an economic gap.

A report they released in 2024 estimates that narrowing the health gap for women every year could increase the global economy by $1TRN.

These benefits will come from lower health care costs, increased productivity and a stronger workforce driven by women’s improved health outcomes.