Why it’s time to close the female health gap

SINGAPORE - If societies want to talk seriously about productivity, start with menopause.

That may sound provocative. But in ageing, high-income economies across Asia, the quality of women’s health is quietly shaping workforce participation, retirement adequacy and long-term growth.

Typically, conversations about women and finance often revolve around familiar themes such as financial literacy, retirement adequacy or the gender pay gap. These are important. 

Yet beneath them lies a more foundational driver of economic security: health.

Women globally live longer than men. Yet they spend about 25 per cent more of their lives in poor health, according to the World Economic Forum. This is not confined to women-only issues like fertility, but also health issues that affect women disproportionately, such as autoimmune diseases and osteoporosis, and those that affect them differently, like cardiovascular diseases and diabetes. 

Health, in other words, is not separate from economic security; it is foundational to it.

Compounding financial effect

Our research shows that over their lifetimes, women need to set aside almost 20 per cent more funds than men to cover medical bills in later years. At the same time, women are likelier to retire earlier than planned, according to one Goldman Sachs survey. When asked why, men most frequently cited fatigue from work. Women cited health.

The result is that lower lifetime earnings combined with longer lifespans and higher medical costs create a compounding effect. For ageing societies such as Singapore – where longevity is a success story and women now make up the majority of university graduates – ignoring women’s health risks undermining retirement adequacy and workforce resilience.  

Reducing women’s time spent in poor health by even a fraction could boost the global economy by at least US$1 trillion (S$1.26 trillion) annually by 2040, estimates the McKinsey Health Institute.

For Asia, home to many rapidly ageing populations, this is a deeply under-utilised structural growth lever.

Systems designed with incomplete data

The roots of this health gap lie in how modern medicine has been designed. 

For decades, women were excluded from many clinical trials. Even today, gender-disaggregated data is inconsistently analysed. In cardiovascular trials – despite heart disease being the leading cause of death among women – female participation remains significantly below parity, according to the American Heart Association Journals. 

Moreover, healthcare was optimised for acute, episodic models of treatment, historically calibrated around male physiology.

In contrast, women’s health is often longitudinal, shaped by hormonal cycles, pregnancy, perimenopause, menopause and longer life expectancy. Hormones influence immune response, cardiovascular risk, metabolism and medication efficacy.

Yet most clinical assessments rely on static snapshots rather than dynamic patterns. 

As one health-tech founder put it, many modern medicine solutions are trying to solve dynamic biological problems with static measurement tools, resulting in a data gap. This data gap then becomes a diagnosis gap, which in turn becomes a health gap – one with knock-on, material economic consequences.

“Femtech” to the fore 

Women’s health innovation is often labelled “femtech”, a term that can unintentionally obscure what is in reality mainstream healthcare for half of the world’s population.  

According to Grand View research, the femtech market – or companies that provide services for women’s health – is projected to reach US$97 billion by 2030, growing at a compounded annual growth rate of over 15 per cent from 2025. Notably, Asia-Pacific is forecast to see the fastest growth, particularly in China and India, supported by digital health adoption, demographic trends and rising start-ups in the sector.

Menopause solutions alone are emerging as a multibillion-dollar opportunity as populations age. In the US, Amboy Street estimates solutions for hot flashes to be a US$19 billion market.

Elsewhere, endometriosis – which has long been underdiagnosed – represents another expanding treatment segment. The market size for treatments is projected to double from US$1.76 billion in 2024 to US$3.52 billion by 2030, supported by advances in artificial intelligence-driven diagnostics.

Yet, access to capital continues to be a challenge. In 2024, Forbes noted just 2.3 per cent of healthcare venture capital was allocated to women’s health companies, a decline from 4.1 per cent in 2023.

Clearly, demand is not the constraint, as women already account for the majority of healthcare spending globally. Rather, impediments lie in capital allocation and the systems that connect scientific discovery to regulation, insurance coverage and employer adoption.

Innovation isn’t the bottleneck; adoption is

Research and technological capabilities in women’s health are advancing rapidly. AI is improving diagnostics. Digital health platforms are enabling earlier intervention and more personalised care. Data science is helping to uncover patterns long overlooked.

But innovation rarely fails because of science alone.

According to femtech entrepreneurs and experts in the field, the challenge lies at the intersection of regulation, reimbursement, procurement and workplace policy.

Many promising solutions struggle to scale because evidence standards, insurance coverage and employer benefit frameworks were not built with women’s longitudinal health journeys in mind. In other words, the systems that translate discovery into delivery remain fragmented and underdeveloped.

For Asia, this represents both a challenge and an opportunity. Governments in this region have demonstrated the will and ability to align policy, infrastructure and innovation. Applying that same systemic coordination to women’s health could unlock durable economic benefits for all.

A strategic imperative

Bridging the female health gap brings a multitude of benefits to ageing societies. It strengthens labour force participation, improves retirement adequacy, reduces long-term healthcare costs and extends productive years. More crucially, it also restores something less easily quantified: dignity.

When women are believed the first time they describe their medical symptoms, when diagnosis is timely and effective and when care anticipates rather than reacts, health stops being a silent tax on ambition.

International Women’s Day is a moment for celebration. But beyond celebration lies strategy.

Advancing women’s health extends beyond moral gestures; it is about economic optimisation. For Singapore and Asia’s ageing economies, we cannot afford to keep treating this health gap as anything less than central to our growth strategy.