Women’s Health Month is observed annually in May, and it officially kicks off every year beginning on Mother’s Day, with National Women’s Health Week. This year’s theme is “Empowering Women, Cultivating Health: Celebrating Voices, Wellness, and Resilience.”
While health care remains a top issue in our politics, and a growing concern in our daily lives, real progress for women’s health still falls short. For most of history, women were ignored in the clinical trials and research needed to understand disease and develop treatment. The result is that even today, scientists lack a basic knowledge of how sex differences affect the onset, progression, and treatment of disease.
What’s more, only 11 percent of the annual NIH budget goes towards women’s health research, and gender disparities in research funding favors conditions that affect men more than women.
Conditions that disproportionately impact women, such as fibroids and endometriosis, are under-studied, and while heart disease is the #1 killer of both women and men, women with cardiac disease are still often overlooked and underdiagnosed.
The National Women’s Health Network has released a 2024 Policy Agenda that includes:
- Expanding access to safe and legal abortion services
- Ensuring affordable contraception access
- Improving sexual education programs and STI screening
- Advancing research initiatives dedicated to conditions that disproportionately affect women
- Reducing racial and ethnic disparities in maternal health outcomes
- Improving the quality of prenatal and postpartum care
- Expanding healthcare coverage for aging women
- Controlling skyrocketing drug prices
- Addressing specific healthcare needs related to menopause and post-menopausal health
The Biden Administration has revitalized funding for women’s health, with $200 million in funding for women’s health research in 2025, and the President has called for Congress to invest $12 billion in new funding “to advance a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research agenda and to establish a new nationwide network of research centers of excellence and innovation in women’s health—which would serve as a national gold standard for women’s health research across the lifespan.”
NOW members know that is long past time for women to get the health care access, research, and innovation they need.