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The Gaps · funding
The Funding Gap
Capital is what turns a documented sex-based difference into something a woman can actually get from her clinician. Women’s health now has a real and accelerating track record of returns. The share of healthcare capital reaching it is still small, and what does arrive is concentrated at the earliest stage.
what the effect is
What the WEF report calls a "leaky pipeline." From 2020 to 2025, women's-health-specific private investment sat 50% at pre-seed or seed, 22% early, 28% later, against 32% / 27% / 41% across healthcare broadly, roughly 18 percentage points more weight on the earliest rung. Not a young-market artifact: at every funding stage, women's health companies are about as old as their peers across healthcare. Meanwhile the returns evidence is substantial, with 272 publicly announced exits 2000 to 2024, nearly half of them in the most recent five years, 27 above $1 billion once four 2025 deals are counted, cumulative exit value above $100 billion, and the $18.3 billion Hologic acquisition by Blackstone and TPG announced in late 2025. The page scopes itself to the growth rung specifically.
What's still missing
The growth rung is the thin one. Early-stage capital for women’s health now exists in real quantity, and the later-stage share sits at 28% against 41% across healthcare broadly. The single clearest opening in this gap is growth capital that carries a validated company from proof of concept to scale, which is also where the WEF report points investors looking for an early position.
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The track record is hard to see. Legacy misclassification, particularly in oncology, diagnostics, and chronic disease, means many women’s health exits get tracked outside the category entirely. A standard sector screen understates what this field has already returned. That is a data problem sitting on top of a capital problem, and better categorization is a genuinely fixable place to start.
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The pool of decision-makers is still narrow. Women hold roughly 15% to 20% of venture decision-making roles, and fewer than 25% of funds apply a gender lens in diligence. All Raise, Pipeline Angels, How Women Invest, and Invest for Better are each moving that number from a different angle, and there is a lot of room ahead of them.
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No single map of the routes by stage. A founder can find lists of femtech funds, and separately lists of federal grants, and separately accelerator directories. What doesn’t yet exist anywhere is one view showing which route fits which stage, from research-stage non-dilutive funding through growth equity. That is the view the Hub’s Capital & Start-up Support directory is being built toward.
where the gap starts
Private-sector financing across healthcare totaled roughly $2.87 trillion between 2020 and 2025. Women's health broadly received 6% of it ($175 billion); companies building specifically for women's health received less than 1% ($23 billion). The public channel that would normally carry the earliest science is narrowing at the same time, which the Science gap page covers in detail.
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Source: WEF Women's Health Investment Outlook 2026 (PitchBook, CapIQ, Crunchbase, BCG).
why this is a gap
Two addressable causes. Who is in the room: women hold 18% of decision-making roles at US venture firms managing more than $50 million and 20% at smaller firms, and fewer than 25% of funds apply a gender-lens strategy in due diligence, which is why investment is the weakest-performing lever in the [w]Health Index (Kearney with UNFPA and the HBA Think Tank). And visibility: AOA Dx's review of 25 years of exits found that many companies serving women in oncology, diagnostics, and chronic disease were recorded under other labels when they sold or went public, so the sector's own returns don't surface on a standard sector screen.
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Sources: All Raise, 2025; [w]Health Healthcare and Life Sciences Index, Kearney with UNFPA and the HBA Think Tank, 2026 report; AOA Dx, Follow the Exits, January 2026.