Blueprint to Close the Women’s Health Gap

The report identifies nine conditions—five affecting lifespan and four affecting health span—that drive over a third of the women's health gap. It argues that addressing these through a five-pillar framework (count, study, care, include, and invest) could add nearly 27 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) annually and contribute approximately $400 billion to global GDP by 2040.

• Nine specific health conditions account for more than a third of the women's health gap. These are divided into lifespan conditions (ischaemic heart disease, cervical cancer, breast cancer, maternal hypertensive disorder, and post-partum haemorrhage) and health-span conditions (menopause, premenstrual syndrome, migraine, and endometriosis).
• Closing the health gap for these nine selected conditions alone could result in an annual global GDP increase of approximately $400 billion and the addition of nearly 27 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) by 2040, which equates to 2.5 additional healthy days per woman per year.
• Ischaemic heart disease is the primary cause of death for women globally, killing over 4 million women annually. Despite this, only 17% of clinical trials for the condition completed in 2022 that were open to both sexes published sex-disaggregated results.
• Cervical cancer mortality is disproportionately concentrated in low- and low-middle-income countries (LICs and LMICs), where approximately 85% of deaths occur. Screening rates vary drastically by region, ranging from 1% in Bangladesh to 73% in Brazil.
• There is a significant misalignment between the global disease burden and research funding. For example, premenstrual syndrome (PMS) accounts for 4% of the women's health gap but received almost zero dollars of research funding per DALY between 2019 and 2023.
• Clinical trial distribution is heavily skewed toward high-income countries (HICs) and upper-middle-income countries (UMICs), which host 77% of trials despite representing only half of the global burden. In contrast, LICs and LMICs experience 54% of the women's health gap but host only 23% of trials.
• Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) for women's health are largely inadequate; less than 9% of CPGs in the 15 studied countries met recommended global standards of evidence-based practice. For PMS, 60% of the studied countries lacked CPGs entirely.
• Addressing structural inequities related to race, gender, and geography could have a more significant impact on mortality for lifespan-affecting conditions than any single treatment studied in Phase 3 clinical trials between 2021 and 2023.
• The report proposes the Women’s Health Impact Tracking (WHIT) platform to centralize data on disease burden, data availability, and treatment effectiveness across 15 representative countries to move away from fragmented data sources.

APA

World Economic Forum (2025). Blueprint to Close the Women’s Health Gap. https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Blueprint_to_Close_the_Women%E2%80%99s_Health_Gap_2025.pdf

Chicago

World Economic Forum. Blueprint to Close the Women’s Health Gap. 2025. https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Blueprint_to_Close_the_Women%E2%80%99s_Health_Gap_2025.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Economic Forum |title=Blueprint to Close the Women’s Health Gap |date=January 2025 |url=https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Blueprint_to_Close_the_Women%E2%80%99s_Health_Gap_2025.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldeconomicforum2025blueprint, author = {{World Economic Forum}}, title = {{Blueprint to Close the Women’s Health Gap}}, institution = {World Economic Forum}, year = {2025}, month = jan, url = {https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Blueprint_to_Close_the_Women%E2%80%99s_Health_Gap_2025.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }