Women’s Health: Addressing the Elephant in the Room

The issue of disparity in women’s health is one very near to my heart. This isn’t true because I am a woman but because I long for a better reality in healthcare for the women I love, including my mother and my daughter. When I discovered that only 4% of all healthcare R&D efforts are focused on women’s health, I was honestly shocked. I knew there was a clear gap given my 30 years working in the healthcare space, but 4% was eye-opening and if someone working in healthcare didn’t know this, what would the general public think?

It was an important question to answer, and the impetus behind running Sago’s recent omnibus survey on the perception of women’s health. The findings revealed a large gap between what the public believed and the facts, many of which we covered in our webinar, “Breaking the Silence on Women’s Health: From Perception to Truth.”

While we talked through differences in R&D, key health conditions most prevalent amongst women, and misunderstandings related to areas such as skin cancer, frequency of infertility, pre-term labor, and the increased amount of time women spend with a debilitating condition vs men, we didn’t did dig deep into the differences we saw in other demographic groups (including risk factors for Black/African American and Hispanic/Latina/o women). While it is true that Black/African American women are at greater risk of pre-term birth resulting in infant death, respondents with this ethnic background were more aware of the disparity and better versed in responding to prenatal and birth complications surveyed. Unfortunately, other ethnic groups – who are also not as frequently affected by these issues – are less aware of these realities. Generating awareness and better education is a critical next step, and identifying messages that can break through and grab attention will be key (market research has always played a strong role in assisting with testing motivating messages, so it thrills me to know that we can be involved in this effort).

Additionally, identifying the gap is a good first step, but understanding why that gap exists can also help us. As one attendee of our webinar asked, is it simply a lack of awareness that is causing the disparity in research, or is it a lack of interest from the companies funding it? Probing to understand the whys really matter. Why do women spend 25% more of their lives than men with a debilitating health condition? Why is breast cancer resoundingly believed to be the most common cancer in women, and why does skin cancer get less press? All of these questions need probing, and here at Sago Health, we love using market research to help inform what we don’t know or need to better understand. Gathering a holistic understanding of why healthcare professionals, patients, caregivers, and the general public believe what they do is essential to solving this problem.

While our study revealed important knowledge gaps, raising awareness is only the first step toward implementing change. We must keep women’s health at the forefront of the conversation. It can be overwhelming to tackle a problem that is too big for any one person or company to solve. We didn’t get into this situation overnight and we won’t solve it overnight. But we must start taking steps forward and that’s why I suggest focusing on one piece of the problem, such as a specific disease area or working hard to improve women’s representation in clinical trials. We don’t have to fix everything all at once, but we must start somewhere.

We at Sago Health are committed to continuing this conversation and doing our part to mitigate the glaring disparities in women’s health research. Come along for the ride and join us in creating a better future for the health of all women.