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Women’s Health Funding Faces Political Threats Amid 2025 Shift
Huddle #Trends
Jared Dashevsky, MD
May 04, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes
HUDDLE #TRENDS
Women’s Health Funding Faces Political Threats Amid 2025 Shift
The women’s health sector made real progress under the Biden Administration—through new research initiatives, record-breaking investment, and long-overdue attention to underserved conditions. But now, as we enter National Women’s Health Month under a new administration, that progress is under pressure.
In this piece, I’ll break down what women’s health really encompasses, explore the latest funding trends, examine the political forces threatening progress, and share my perspective as a physician on why this moment matters for clinical care.
Women’s Health 101
Women’s health is commonly thought to stop at reproductive and gynecological care. It’s just outdated dogma driven by lack of funding and research into the broader areas of women’s health. Take endometriosis, for example. In 2022, the NIH spent just $16M on endometriosis research—about $2 per patient per year. By contrast, Crohn’s disease received $90M, equating to $130 per person (despite affecting six times fewer people!).
Recognizing that women comprise more than half the population and are uniquely affected by a wide range of conditions, from reproductive health to cardiovascular health, underscores the urgent need for more attention and investment. Here is a more comprehensive picture of women’s health from the Framework of Women’s Health:
The failure to invest adequately in research focused on sex-specific biology has delayed progress in fully understanding the basic pathophysiology that drives conditions unique to women. The ripple effects have seeped into slow progress on the digital health innovation front. However, the women’s health space is reaching a tipping point.
The Deets: Investment Trends
The women’s health space is finally getting the attention it deserves—at least from investors.
In 2024, global investment in women’s health hit a record $2.6 billion, up nearly $1 billion from the previous year—a 160% increase. And that’s just the core women’s health segment. If you include adjacent conditions like autoimmune disease, Alzheimer’s, and behavioral health—conditions that affect women disproportionately—that number balloons to $10.7 billion.
Silicon Valley Bank Innovtion in Women’s Health
Health tech companies drew the largest slice of the funding pie with $988M raised, followed by a surge in biopharma investment ($880M)—a 275% increase compared to 2020. The market is maturing. What started with fertility apps and birth control delivery is now expanding into oncology, menopause, cardiometabolic disease, and precision medicine. Notable raises and moves include:
Evernow: Partnered with Clearblue to combine at-home hormone testing and virtual menopause care.
Cigna + Progyny: Expanded fertility benefit access to more employers.
Teal Health: Raised $10M for at-home cervical cancer screening.
Chiyo: Launched nutrition programs to support fertility and hormonal balance.
Wellcome Leap: Committed $50M to research on heavy menstrual bleeding.
LifeMD: Acquired a virtual women’s health platform to expand its care model.
Alloy: Rolled out a weight management program for menopausal women.
Allara: Closed a $26M round to scale its PCOS and hormone care services.
If you’re looking to stay plugged into this space, I highly recommend subscribing to Femtech Insider.
All signs point to women’s health moving from niche to mainstream. But while venture capital is pouring in, the broader policy environment tells a different story.
Political Headwinds
Despite progress in women’s health funding and research, we’re in the midst of a setback in light of recent executive orders and funding cuts. Unfortunately, many others and I predicted this would happen with the Trump Administration.
There was great progress made for women’s health under the Biden Administration, which I covered in my white paper on women’s health back in July 2024 with Nyoo Health—so I’ll spare you the text.
So far in 2025, we’ve seen a rollercoaster of actions taken against women’s health.
The first 100 days of the Trump Administration ushered in a wave of changes that directly target reproductive health and women’s health research. A few key shifts:
The Global Gag Rule was reinstated, blocking U.S. funding to international NGOs that even mention abortion—even if they use non-U.S. funds. This effectively gutted access to contraception, STI screenings, and safe abortions in dozens of countries.
The Administration revoked several Biden-era Executive Orders aimed at protecting reproductive care—like access to emergency abortions, contraception, and telemedicine support for reproductive services.
On the funding front, Trump’s team froze Title X funding for 16 organizations—potentially disrupting access for over 840,000 low-income patients who rely on the program for birth control, cancer screenings, and STI testing.
The Hyde Amendment was expanded via executive order to ban not just direct abortion funding, but anything that “promotes” it—including research and educational materials.
Trump’s DOJ dropped a critical lawsuit defending EMTALA, which had protected access to emergency abortion care in states like Idaho. The move jeopardized pregnant patients needing life-saving interventions in emergency settings.
The CDC and HHS underwent massive layoffs, including the elimination of teams working on maternal health surveillance, IVF tracking, and abortion access data. Programs like PRAMS and ART surveillance, which quietly inform clinical guidelines and public policy, were gutted.
Even access to basic health information was hit. In February, government websites with reproductive health content (including from the FDA and CDC) were abruptly taken offline or censored—only partially restored after court orders.
Funding for women’s health research was temporarily paused through an attempted blanket freeze on federal grants, triggering panic among labs, including NIH-funded projects. While a judge blocked the freeze, the chaos led to canceled NIH study panels, delayed timelines, and real concerns about long-term viability for many researchers.
And then there was the NIH Women’s Health Initiative debacle.
In March, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) quietly proposed cutting funding to the Women’s Health Initiative Extension Study, a landmark multi-decade project that has informed everything from hormone therapy guidelines to cardiovascular disease prevention in women. The planned cut would’ve derailed follow-up data collection and forced participants—many of whom had been in the study for decades—out of their long-standing research relationships.
After intense public backlash, HHS reversed course and announced it would restore the funding. But the damage was already done. The near-elimination of such a foundational women’s health study sent a chilling message to researchers: even the most established, evidence-generating programs aren’t safe in the current political climate. The uncertainty has ripple effects—not just in labs, but in boardrooms, clinics, and the funding landscape at large.
This brings me to the next question: if public funding falters, can the private sector pick up the slack? And more importantly—should it have to?
Dashevsky’s Dissection
The onus will be on the private sector to promote, fund, and innovate within the women’s health sector while the industry navigates a tumultuous political climate. To answer my earlier question—the private sector shouldn’t have to carry this load—but it will. And I’m cautiously optimistic that this moment will actually catalyze rapid progress despite a higher activation energy.
Just look at the recent partnership between the World Economic Forum and McKinsey Health Institute. They launched the Women’s Health Impact Tracking Platform, a global tool designed to measure progress toward closing the women’s health gap across diseases, countries, and interventions. These efforts are an encouraging sign—but platforms don’t replace policy, and dashboards don’t drive discovery. We still need public investment and regulatory commitment to move the needle.
As a physician, I see the downstream effects of this systemic underinvestment every day:
Clinical: The lack of research into sex-specific disease presentation and treatment has real consequences at the bedside. Too often, women are misdiagnosed, dismissed, or treated based on data derived from male-centric trials. More investment into R&D focused on female biology means better tools, better outcomes, and fewer gaps in care.
Systemic: According to McKinsey, closing the women’s health gap could add $1 trillion to the global economy by 2040. This is the downstream result of healthier people, fewer hospitalizations, and more productive years lived.
Workforce: Women are the “chief medical officers” of their households. When their health suffers, so does the system around them. Investing in their care is a multiplier effect—it improves health outcomes for entire families, reduces unnecessary ED visits, and lowers downstream costs.
Access: With public funding on shaky ground, patients in rural and low-income areas are especially vulnerable. Many already lack OB/GYNs within driving distance. Now, take away Title X, defund contraception programs, or censor information on FDA websites—and you lose access and agency.
I was trained to make evidence-based decisions. But when the evidence doesn’t exist—or gets defunded— it’s dangerous. Many of the clinical gaps we face are political in origin, not medical. And that means solutions won’t come from stethoscopes alone.
If we want better health outcomes, we can’t treat over half the population as a niche market. We need to stop thinking of women’s health as a silo—and start treating it as foundational to medicine and public health itself.
In summary, women’s health is finally gaining the investment and innovation it’s long deserved—but that momentum is clashing with political regression. As physicians, we’re left to navigate the fallout in clinic while the larger system decides whether to move forward or backward. If public support falters, the private sector must step up—not because it should, but because patients can’t wait.
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