The need is now.
Changing the landscape
of women’s health
The Foundation for Women’s Health (FWH) is a nonprofit research fund that was created to close the longstanding gaps in women’s health research. FWH identifies understudied and underfunded research questions across the entire continuum of the female life cycle – from adolescence through menopause and beyond – and funds the most innovative and impactful research proposals to fill those gaps to directly improve women’s lives and achieve gender equity in health.
FWH takes a systems-level approach to women's health, bringing together the nation's leading experts in women's health with a wide diversity of expertise and geography to identify the greatest gaps in research and the studies most likely to create meaningful change. Through a competitive proposal process, FWH awards funding to the scientists advancing innovative impact in women's health and drives the translation of these research studies into real-world care in collaboration with a curated panel of advisors whose expertise spans venture capital investment, entrepreneurship and political strategy.
FWH is driven by a fundamental belief that the historic gender imbalance in medical research is not inevitable, it is correctable. FWH's mission is to correct that failure and deliver the rigorous, evidence-based research, diagnostics, and therapeutics that women have been owed for far too long.
Women were categorically excluded from clinical research trials in the United States until 1993, when the NIH Revitalization Act became federal law, requiring women and minorities to be included as subjects of health research.
Decades of exclusion of women as study subjects resulted in a gross inequity in rigorous research of women’s health that persists, 30 years later
FWH was created to fill the gaps in rigorous research of women’s health
While many insitutions fund specific women’s health issues, FWH looks at women’s health research across the entire life cycle to identify where the knowledge gaps exist, and then identifies the most promising clinical studies to fund to fill those gaps.
Our findings are disseminated not only through academic channels, but also through traditional and social media channels so that novel findings are translated into real-world application that affect women today.
The systematic exclusion of women has had fatal consequences and has led to incorrect dosing and treatment assumptions for women for very common diseases. We must start investing in women’s health by investing in the research required to address persistently unanswered questions.
We cannot rely on a public sector solution. Less than 9% of NIH research grants were dedicated to women’s health research from 2013 - 2023 despite women representing 51% of the American population. Researchers can only pursue projects they can get funded, which is why, absent sufficient public funding, private funders need to increase opportunities for women’s health research.
