Not So "Niche": The Trillion Dollar Women's Health Opportunity

A conversation with Dr. Lucy Pérez, Global Leader, McKinsey Health Institute

Among the many hard things builders in women’s health face, getting the world to give a damn — and put their money where their mouth is — is one of the most challenging. Why is this so hard? Historically, women’s health has been seen as a charity case, a moral issue rather than an economic one. If I’ve learned one thing from my own founder journey it’s that pulling at people’s heart strings is not enough to get through an investment committee or close a deal with a payor or provider. In women’s health especially, the business case must be incredibly compelling, quantifiable, and in my experience, is held to a higher bar than other areas of healthcare.

Enough lamenting. The tides are (finally!) turning, thanks to mounting evidence that underlies the massive and largely untapped women’s health market opportunity. Last year, a groundbreaking report by the McKinsey Health Institute in collaboration with the World Economic Forum outlined the enormous $1 trillion annual opportunity to close the women’s gap. Now, their most recent 2025 report lays out a tactical blueprint to close this gap, specifically by addressing nine key women’s health conditions via efforts to count, study, care for, include, and invest in women. (You might be surprised by what these nine women’s health conditions are!).

If you can’t tell by now, I’m incredibly excited by these findings and the reframing of women’s health from a problem we should feel bad about to an opportunity worth seizing. Going deep on the economic opportunity was the obvious place to start for my first issue of The XX Factor.

Below is a synthesis of my conversation with Dr. Lucy Pérez — Senior Partner at McKinsey, Global Leader of MHI and one of the lead authors of this game-changing report. We unpack the key findings, discuss the industry’s response thus far, and provide a tangible framework for turning awareness into collective action.

Breaking Down the TrillIon Dollar Opportunity

Carolyn Witte: Your report makes the economic case for investing in women’s health, framing it as a productivity issue vs. share of healthcare dollars. To start, can you break down this $1 trillion number?

Dr. Lucy Pérez: I get this question all the time because you’re right — $1 trillion is a huge number! But it’s true, $1 trillion represents the total potential GDP impact by improving women’s health and economic participation — specifically, having fewer health conditions, increased participation, increased productivity, and fewer early deaths for women globally. By linking possible health gains with labor force involvement and productivity, we can more clearly quantify the potential economic impacts of women’s health interventions.

For example, the women’s health gap equates to 75 million years of life lost due to poor health or early death per year — addressing this gap could generate the equivalent impact of 137 million women accessing full time positions by 2040. This has the potential to lift women out of poverty and allow more women to provide for themselves and their families.

Beyond the $1 trillion number in economic productivity, there’s also a significant opportunity in the market for new products and services to address the numerous health needs of women that are going unaddressed. Take endometriosis or polycystic ovarian syndrome for example. Each of these conditions impacts 1 in 10 women on average and yet we don’t have effective solutions for the women suffering from them. So the demand for such solutions is huge; we are talking about markets that are greater than $100B each.

Expanding our Definition of Women’s Health

CW: As a long-time advocate of women’s health beyond reproductive health alone, I was excited to see you put forth a more comprehensive definition. Can you share more about the nine conditions you highlight, how you selected them, and why this broadening of women’s health is so critical from both a clinical and economic perspective?

LP: It’s a myth that women’s health is just the healthcare tied to sexual and reproductive health conditions and functions — the reality is that an overwhelming majority of the global women’s health burden is attributable to conditions that affect both men and women, but impact women disproportionately (such as migraines), or differently (such as heart disease). In fact, 51% of the women’s health burden is driven by these types of health issues that aren’t traditionally thought of as “women’s health.” Understanding these conditions, and differences in care delivery and efficacy across men and women, is critical to improving women’s health and closing the gap.

For our most recent report, we selected nine priority conditions which cover ~35% of women’s disease burden. These conditions represent a diversity of conditions impacting women in different ways and serve as a blueprint to how we should approach addressing the women’s health gap in other conditions.

We categorized these conditions as affecting the lifespan and leading to early death (i.e., ischemic heart disease, breast cancer, cervical cancer, maternal hypertensive disorders, and postpartum hemorrhage), versus affecting health span, causing significant distress and resulting in women living longer in disability (i.e., premenstrual syndrome, menopause, endometriosis, and migraines). All of these conditions are important and require funding, attention, and resources.

Improving Lifespan and Healthspan

CW: It’s well documented that women outlive men in most countries around the world. In the U.S., women’s life expectancy is about 80 compared to 75 for men. What is less talked about, however, is the relative quality of women’s lives. Your report highlights that women live in poor health for 25 percent more of their lives than men do. What makes this so impactful, in my opinion, is how you utilize the Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) metric to make the notoriously murky concept of “healthspan” concrete. Can you explain what this metric is, why it’s a more accurate way to look at health impact as compared to lifespan alone, and how it can be used as a tool to allocate investment dollars?

LP: I’m so happy you asked this because many people aren’t familiar with DALYs and how they can help us understand health conditions. DALYs provide a comprehensive measure on the burden of disease by encompassing both years of life lost and years of life with a disability. By combining these metrics, DALYs allow us to better understand which conditions disproportionately impact women and when. The “when” is very important because most people assume women’s health gap is concentrated at the end of life, but instead what the data shows is that the majority of this health gap is happening between ages 20-60 when women are in their prime working years.

This analysis allows us to be better informed on the types of investments we need to address these health conditions more directly, such as what exactly needs to be targeted, by which type of stakeholders, and when in terms of priority to maximize the economic impact.

As an example, per our report, breast cancer represents potential estimated gains of 1.2M annual DALYs and $8.7B in annual GDP in the women’s health gap. By comparison, menopause — which doesn’t impact years of life lost as much, but can significantly reduce women’s quality of life and during the peak of their careers — represents almost double the burden of disease and an even larger GDP impact: potential estimated gains of 2.4M annual DALYs and $120B in annual GDP in the women’s health gap. Despite this, menopause is relatively underfunded compared with disease burden.

In short, using DALYs gives us a clear, quantifiable way to measure women’s disease burden, and an economic rationale to invest in many non-life threatening but widespread or debilitating health conditions that are all too often ignored.

The Industry Response

CW: Earlier this year, you launched this report at the World Economic Forum. What was the response in the room from global leaders?

LP: It has been inspiring to see the increased attention and funding being directed towards women's health. We’ve had a series of discussions on closing the gap, the role of collaboration across different stakeholders in addressing it, and what we can all do today to advance progress in our communities and globally.

Personally, I’ve felt very energized by the action-oriented efforts among global leaders and their commitments to this cause. However, I also think it’s important to engage individuals supporting this work day-to-day. During our side event at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos this past January, we held guided small group discussions that allowed participants to share more details of their work, such as actively engaging with communities, ensuring equitable access to resources, and promoting quality and affordable care. In particular, it was energizing to see many more employers actively engaging in how to support women’s health in the workplace. I am extremely grateful to collaborate with such talented, thoughtful, and determined individuals – I strongly believe there are roles we can all play to address the women’s health gap and build stronger economies.

CW: How has the healthcare industry reacted? Any notable responses from life sciences, payors and providers?

LP: Overall, we’ve received positive reactions across the healthcare industry broadly and increased interest in women’s health initiatives. For example, some payors are working to expand types of resources and coverage for women’s health needs and provide additional preventative care programs to reduce the risk of diseases that disproportionately impact women. Providers are promoting integrated care models to address women’s health more holistically, while also implementing new guidelines and protocols to guide decision-making and minimize bias. Across biopharma, we are beginning to see greater focus on understandings sex-based differences across the value chain from how research is conducted to how it informs medical education activities.

This is just the start of what is needed to address the gap and much more funding of women’s health research is needed, but through these collective efforts, awareness and conversation on this essential topic is increasing and that’s the first step.

From Awareness → Action

CW: One of the most powerful aspects of your report is that it goes beyond identifying the problem and provides a clear blueprint for action for the industry to follow. You outline five key steps: count, study, care for, include, and invest in women. Where do you see the most momentum right now?

LP: I believe the five pillars of our blueprint can offer a guiding principle to track women’s health priorities and hold women’s health stakeholders accountable as they pursue efforts to close the gap.

We’ve seen excitement for this from different players across the ecosystem, from biopharma companies working to accelerate the development of solutions for women's health unmet needs, all the way to healthcare systems developing innovative care delivery models to address barriers to care. Investors are increasingly allocating resources towards closing the women's health gap and more and more employers are creating women-friendly workplaces with policies and resources that support women's health and well-being. I’ve even heard from multiple entrepreneurs how they were able to get seed funding for their companies thanks to referencing our report. It’s exciting and humbling to know these reports are truly raising awareness about these core women’s health topics and helping drive action and investment.

Now is a critical time to maintain this momentum and ensure that we are bringing together key leaders across industries to help address the women’s health gap. The more organizations and institutions that are involved, the more we can hold ourselves accountable to prioritizing women’s health needs.

CW: What’s next? How can we track the progress and stay engaged in the conversation you’ve sparked?

LP: Beyond driving critical awareness on the opportunity, we’re supporting the industry in measuring progress through our Women’s Health Impact Tracking (WHIT) platform, which we launched with the World Economic Forum alongside our latest report — a publicly accessible, scalable tool to measure, track, and address gaps across women’s health. It provides country-level indicators on data availability, treatment effectiveness, and quality and appropriateness of care delivery, and was designed by stakeholders, for stakeholders, as a practical and tactical tool to track progress over time. In other words, we can now begin tracking our collective progress on closing the women’s health gap — and actually hold each other accountable.

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If you enjoyed this interview and want to go deeper…

• Read the full report — an essential for all builders and funders in women’s health!

• Deep dive on the biopharma opportunity — an amazing resource for those of you nerd-ing out on the gender gap in clinical trials, the importance of disaggregating data based on sex, and more

• Join the upcoming webinar — in honor of International Women’s Day, the McKinsey team is hosting a webinar to discuss the blueprint and tactical ways to drive action. Register and tune in here. March 7, 10-11 ET

And if you’re new here and need some context…

• Check out my introduction to The XX Factor to learn what this project is all about

• Subscribe to The XX Factor (please and thank you!) for a weekly dose of insights, analysis and conversation on the future of women’s health

• Send me a note to say 👋, give me feedback or share a topic you’re eager to see me cover!

xx. Carolyn