Health is supposed to be gender-neutral. But is it, really?
As of 2024, males comprised 50.28% of the world's 8.2 billion population, while women represented 49.72%. For the number aficionados, that's close to 3.97 billion people who were AFABs.
In a world that is slowly warming up to the concept of equality of genders (or equity), healthcare shouldn't matter if you are a man or a woman, right?... Right?
Well, I hate to break it to you, but as much as we'd like to believe that our health is independent of our biological sex, the reality is very different. According to McKinsey, in 2020, only 1% of healthcare research and innovation funding was directed toward female-specific conditions, excluding oncology.
And if you dig deeper, beyond cancer, the only other area where there is funding for research is reproductive health. But isn't women's health much more than just reproductive health? When one-half of the entire global population is female, this discrimination in healthcare feels personal. Let's talk about it.
