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the six gaps
Six problems it will take collaboration to solve.
These are the structural, field-wide gaps in women's health that individual companies generally don't prioritize, because they're bigger than any one product. For each one, this page maps who's already working on it and where the Hub's own role is to connect that work rather than duplicate it.
01 - Science
What's actually known about sex-based differences, and what still isn't, is a moving line to track, not a fixed body of knowledge to catalog once.
Only 10% of clinical trials for ischemic heart disease and migraine report sex-specific data at all.
who's working on it
WHAM (Women's Health Access Matters), McKinsey Health Institute, the National Strategy Coalition (its Research & Innovation and Data Infrastructure pillars, $11B combined)
Covered in the Thinktanks landscape
02 - translation
New science and updated clinical guidance can take years to reach the exam room, even when no new product or device is involved.
Research evidence is widely estimated to take 17 years to reach routine clinical practice, and even then, fewer than half of evidence-based advances are ever fully adopted.
who's working on it
No organization found treats this specific lag for women's health as a dedicated, named focus. Milken's clinical-deployment work is the closest analogue.
The Compendium sits in this lane.
03 - education
Bringing sex-based differences into how clinicians, students and the public learn, from medical school through continuing education.
Of the 2026 National Strategy coalition's $20B ask, $8B (Workforce plus Public Education) goes toward this gap, the largest single share of the four. Nursing and dentistry still have no program comparable to what already exists for physicians.
who's working on it
AMWA's Sex and Gender Health Collaborative, The Menopause Society, Mayo Clinic School of CPD, the National Strategy coalition (its Workforce and Public Education pillars)
Full education landscape scan complete
the structural gaps
04 - reimbursement
Getting women's health care and innovation actually paid for, one of the field's most persistently unresolved issues.
Procedures on female anatomy are reimbursed at an average of 30% less than comparable procedures on male anatomy, a gap that has persisted for more than three decades.
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Female-specific procedures reimburse at roughly $555/hour, versus $599/hour for comparable male-specific ones.
who's working on it
Milken Institute's Coverage and Reimbursement Working Group, ACOG, Women's Health Advocates
Full reimbursement landscape scan complete
Who controls the resources
05 - leadership
If more women led healthcare companies, more companies would prioritize women's health, though that causal link is still a working hypothesis, not a proven one.
Female biotech/pharma CEOs sit at 18.7%, and board seats declined rather than grew. The [w]Health Index found women hold under 20% of investor seats and ties that directly to blind spots in what gets funded.
who's working on it
HBA (Gender Parity Collaborative & Think Tank), Women In Bio (Boardroom Ready), Stella, Athena Alliance, All Raise, most of these are broader female-founder or leadership orgs, not women's-health-specific
Leadership landscape scan complete
06 - funding
Two different levers: who controls the checkbook, and what non-VC channels exist to fund the field directly.
Female investors hold 15-17% of VC decision-making roles; women-led companies received just 1.2% of 2025's US venture capital despite generating 78¢ of revenue per dollar raised, versus 31¢ for male-founded companies.
who's working on it
Capital allocation: Pipeline Angels, How Women Invest / How Women Lead, Invest for Better, All Raise. Other avenues: 10 dedicated women's-health VC funds already mapped, plus a one-time, non-recurring 2023 precedent, ARPA-H's Sprint for Women's Health ($110M+ awarded, hasn't continued since)
Funding landscape scan complete
across all six
Six gaps, one system.
Focus helps. Each of these gaps needs people who know it deeply, and the organizations working inside each one are doing work nobody else is positioned to do. What no single lane can see is how the six move together. What is known shapes what is taught. What is taught shapes what a clinician recognizes. What is recognized shapes what gets paid for. What gets paid for shapes where capital goes, and that shapes what gets studied next.
Depth and width are both real work.
Specialists inside one gap see things nobody else does. Seeing how the six fit together is a different skill, and needing both is not a criticism of either.
The handoffs are where effort gets lost.
A finding that never reaches a curriculum, or a clinician trained to spot something the coding does not cover. Nothing failed inside its own lane, the connection between lanes was just never made.
Someone has to zoom out.
This is what ecosystem builders do: hold the whole picture so the organizations going deep in one area can find the others whose work meets theirs.
This layer belongs to everyone building here.
The Hub is one of the groups working on it, and far from the only one. Associations, collaboratives, regional networks, and coalitions are all doing versions of this connective work already. See who else is building across the ecosystem.