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The Gaps · leadership
The Leadership Gap
Women are most of the healthcare workforce and a much smaller share of the people who run healthcare companies, sit on their boards, and decide which companies get funded. The rooms where priorities get set shape which health questions get asked, and who is in those rooms is something the field can change.
what the effect is
Decisions about which health questions get funded, researched, and built for are made by people, and the [w]Health Index shows how directly that composition carries into behavior: most funds still reach diligence without a gender lens, and investment scores as the least mature of its six levers. The practical effect is that women’s health arrives in a decision room as an unfamiliar category rather than a recognized market, so it has to be explained before it can be evaluated. The link between who leads and what a company builds is supported from several directions rather than isolated in a single study, and it is worth stating that way rather than asserting it.
The direction of travel is encouraging on its own terms. Among investor respondents to the [w]Health Index, 29% have a women’s health investment thesis today and 69% expect to be making those investments within five years, which suggests the shift is already underway and that the work now is helping it arrive faster. The investor-seat side of this has already moved once: the share of decision-makers at US venture firms who are women has doubled from 9% to 18%, a shift All Raise organized for and reached three years ahead of its 2028 target. The Hub’s Funding page picks up that thread.
What's still missing
The programs are general, the need is specific. Board-readiness programs exist and work. What none of them yet does is pair that preparation with women’s-health fluency, so that a newly seated director arrives already able to evaluate a sex-based-differences thesis on its merits.
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The core claim deserves its own study. The link between who leads and what gets built is supported from several directions and proven from none. A focused piece of research, even a modest one comparing women’s-health product lines against leadership composition across a defined set of companies, would give the whole field something firmer to stand on.
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The policy route has narrowed, so the voluntary route matters more. Board-composition mandates have been struck down and the Nasdaq disclosure rule was vacated, leaving a handful of state disclosure laws and whatever companies choose to publish. That makes benchmarks like the Gender Parity Collaborative and the [w]Health Index the main source of pressure, which is an argument for more organizations joining them.
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Leadership and funding move together. Who holds the checkbook and who runs the company are two halves of one question, and the [w]Health Index is currently the only artifact treating them that way. The Hub’s Funding page picks up the capital side of this directly.
where the gap starts
Healthcare begins from a stronger position than most industries. Per the HBA Gender Parity Collaborative, drawing on McKinsey's Women in the Workplace dataset, women hold 42% of VP roles in healthcare against 29% across corporate America, and 31% of SVP roles against 23%. That advantage narrows at the top, where the healthcare C-suite sits at 30% women. In UK biotech and pharma, women hold 18.7% of CEO seats in 2026, up from 18.3% the year before, alongside 20% of Chief Scientific Officer roles and 14% of Chief Technology Officer roles.
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why this is a gap
The composition of a leadership team or an investment committee shapes which problems get recognized as markets worth building for. The [w]Health Index, built by Kearney with UNFPA and the HBA Think Tank, makes that link explicit on the capital side: women are under 20% of investors, fewer than 25% of funds apply a gender-lens strategy during due diligence, and only about 1 in 7 carry gender considerations into value creation and portfolio management. Investment is the index's least mature of six levers, with roughly 30% of investor respondents reaching its advanced stages.
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Sources: [w]Health Healthcare and Life Sciences Index, Kearney with UNFPA and the HBA Think Tank, 2026 report.