What do you think of when you hear the term “women’s health”?
“Most people think it means care that has to do with female reproductive organs,” said Amy Degenkolb, CEO of Fogarty company-in-residence Novocuff, Inc. Novocuff is a medical device company dedicated to improving outcomes for pregnancies affected by preterm premature rupture of membranes (PPROM) or short cervix. “People relate it to pregnancy, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, periods, maybe even menopause.”
But “women’s health” is also used as a healthcare sector, appearing in dropdown lists alongside clinical specialties like cardiology, neurology and orthopedics — even though women’s health describes a demographic, not a clinical focus. “It’s a category error,” said Tracy MacNeal, CEO of Fogarty company-in-residence Materna Medical. Materna is a novel OB/GYN platform company dedicated to protecting and restoring women’s pelvic health.
The result is confusion across the ecosystem. “When I was fundraising for my Series A, the venture and grant language around ‘women’s health’ was often so vague that it was impossible to tell whether the investors wanted to support female-led companies, maternal health, technologies for female patients, or something else,” Degenkolb said. “It was hard to figure out which doors were the right ones to knock on.”
Both prevailing definitions — women’s health as reproductive medicine, and women’s health as a healthcare vertical — fall short, and for different reasons.
Women’s health ≠ reproductive health
Using “women’s health” as shorthand for reproductive medicine reduces healthcare for women to the body parts and systems that differ most obviously from men’s.
It is a narrow lens with echoes of medicine’s past. For much of medical history, the male body was treated as the norm and the female body as the deviation. Beyond the reproductive system, women were believed to function like “small men.”
“The term ‘women’s health’ was broad enough to cover the whole patient, yet for the last fifty years it’s been used to talk about one organ system,” Degenkolb said.
It also makes investing in healthcare for women harder because of the stigma and discomfort surrounding women’s reproductive health. “Menstruation is inherently ‘icky.’ Contraception and fertility are highly politicized. And many of the other ‘undercarriage issues’ that seriously complicate women’s quality of life get lumped together and remain understudied,” said MacNeal.
Tracy Warren is Senior Managing Director at the American Heart Association Go Red for Women Venture FundTM, which invests across cardiovascular, neurological, and related health conditions that affect the heart and brain.
“The women’s health movement created a problem for itself,” Warren said. “By defining women’s health in this way, we built a category that people have to raise their hand to be a part of. Although the term helped raise awareness, we created an island and looped in a bunch of companies that then needed ‘women’s health investors.’ It became a bit of an echo chamber.”
Women’s health ≠ a vertical
At the same time, using the term as a healthcare sector or “vertical” creates a different problem.
“As a classification, it doesn’t tell you anything useful,” MacNeal said. “You can’t organize around it.”
The problem came into focus while she was leading the Women’s Health Equity Initiative at AdvaMed. Strategics with products that served women were considering whether to consolidate them into women’s health business units. But operationally, the terminology didn’t hold up.
In medtech, a call point is the physician, department, or budget holder responsible for evaluating, buying, or using a product. It shapes everything from key opinion leader strategy and trial design to reimbursement and commercialization. Women’s health has no single call point — no department, board certification or single society meeting.
“Even OB/GYN isn’t all the same — obstetrics is a totally different call point than GYN surgery,” MacNeal said. She explains that her company’s investigational Ellora device, used during labor with clinical endpoints aiming to make vaginal delivery safer and easier, operates in a different clinical and commercial ecosystem from companies developing technologies for heavy menstrual bleeding. “I don’t work in that space. I don’t know about those technologies, and those aren’t my customers,” she said.
A lack of data
Medicine is still working from a fragmented and incomplete understanding of how diseases, drugs, devices and interventions affect women.
From 1977 to 1993, women of childbearing age were largely kept out of clinical trials because of concerns about fetal harm, the effect of hormonal cycles on study data, and paternalistic assumptions about women’s ability to weigh risk. Although the exclusion ended, major gaps remain in evidence, understanding, and innovation specific to women.
“I was in college when the first woman-specific knee replacement was designed and tested in trials,” said Degenkolb, a biomedical engineer by training. “But women have had a different hip-to-knee-to-ankle structure since forever.”
A 2024 McKinsey Health Institute analysis of the conditions accounting for most of the global disease burden among women found that, among 650 academic research papers, nearly half did not provide data on sex-based differences.
The deficit could become even more consequential as medicine becomes increasingly data-driven. Degenkolb worries that AI models trained on datasets built disproportionately from male patients could perpetuate existing gaps. “It’s only as good as the data you put in,” she said.
A broader lens
Beginning around 1990, the NIH advanced a wider definition of “women’s health” that includes conditions affecting women differently, disproportionately or exclusively.
This is the framework that resonates with Degenkolb, MacNeal and Warren. It reflects the full spectrum of ways that healthcare can better serve women throughout their lives. It also offers a roadmap for closing longstanding gaps by asking: Where are women experiencing different disease patterns, gaps in diagnosis, differences in response to treatment or disparities in outcomes?
It also has the potential to turn up the funding spigot.
“Women are 51% of the population,” Warren said. “Any healthcare company serving people is serving women, and there is a major untapped business opportunity in leveraging the different ways women experience disease states to create differentiated products that better serve this massive market.”
What the lens reveals
Consider cardiovascular disease, the number one killer of women.
Up to half of women who arrive at a hospital with chest pain and signs of coronary disease show no blockage on angiography. Their symptoms are real, but the diagnostic pathway was built around the male pattern of disease.
Even though the condition has been recognized and named (ischemia with non-obstructive coronary arteries, or INOCA), diagnostic criteria remain inconsistent and reimbursement for advanced testing is limited. INOCA is one of four priority areas in a 2026 request for proposals called “Redefining Women’s Health: From Heart to Head to Hormones,” from the Go Red for Women Venture Fund and Studio Red, the early-stage venture studio and incubator of American Heart Association Ventures.
“This broader definition is allowing us to come back to healthcare as it is developed and say, where are the disparities for women? Where are the sex-based differences we need to be strategic about? And how do we make really strong investment decisions about it?” Warren said.
“Women’s health doesn’t just mean treating women,” she continued. The goal is to address conditions affecting both sexes while solving disparities in diagnosis, treatment or outcomes for women.
Warren’s portfolio includes a stroke medical device company and an AI imaging company addressing conditions that disproportionately affect women — but that is not necessarily why other investors joined their rounds.
“The other $55 million around the table didn’t care,” Warren said. “They went in because it’s a good investment.”
An investable opportunity
That is part of what makes the broader framework commercially significant.
Rather than creating an entirely separate women’s health market, companies addressing sex-based disparities can operate within established clinical categories, with existing sales channels, reimbursement structures, investors and potential acquirers.
“You want to go through known sales channels so you’re not trying to create a market, and you want to play into places where reimbursement exists,” Warren said. “Big acquirers are built around those categories.”
But Warren cautions against assuming that broadening the definition will solve the funding problem for companies addressing conditions specific to women. “They’re two completely different work streams,” she said.
She continued, ““Those companies face distinct questions about reimbursement, path to market, sales channels, value prop clarity, and so on. There are very few large funds dedicated to those conditions, so funding tends to plateau at certain levels.”
There are some positive developments, however. “New initiatives from specialty society ACOG (American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology) and CMS, such as the unbundling of obstetric codes, have the promise of righting some of the reimbursement discrepancy,” says Degenkolb.
At the same time, though, the broader definition can bring generalist investors into established clinical areas where women experience different or disproportionate disease burdens.
The Go Red for Women Venture Fund operationalizes this broader approach. It will not invest without evidence that a company is addressing a disparity, and it asks portfolio companies to report results by sex, including trial recruitment and outcomes.
Warren calls the approach “getting specific and being intentional.”
Getting specific
That specificity may be the key going forward: Use women’s health as a lens. Name the clinical specialty or call point when talking about the market.
“The lens of women’s health should be an overlay on every strategic initiative and annual planning cycle for all of medtech,” MacNeal said. “We should be aiming to consider how our technologies can impact all people. Beyond that, medtech leaders should refer to the call point they serve. If you’re working in cardiology, talk about cardiology. If you’re working in obstetrics, talk about obstetrics.”
For Degenkolb, that precision starts with those closest to the work.
“The onus is on us,” she said. “If we’re all saying women’s health and we’re thinking different things, we’re not going to make the changes that need to happen. When we start to group people together with common language, we can have a common goal and move forward to mobilize funds, energy, and resources. We have to be able to name the problem if we want to be able to solve it.”