Context
For every $100 invested in a man's health, OECD systems recover 2.62 months of life. For a woman, 1.56 months. That 40% gap -- measured across 27 nations -- is not a fact of biology. It is a design failure: diagnostic protocols, drug dosing, trial enrollment, screening guidelines, and AI training sets were built on male physiology as the unmarked default. Women enter a system that was not built for them, and the cost of that mismatch compounds silently -- through delayed diagnoses, misrouted referrals, and missed windows for early intervention -- until it emerges as the emergency admissions, the early retirements, and the disability claims that governments, insurers, and employers are already absorbing.
Swiss Federal Councillor Elisabeth Baume-Schneider opened by grounding this in clinical specifics: 78% of autoimmune patients are women yet treatments rarely account for hormonal differences; endometriosis diagnosis is delayed 6.6-8.6 years; one in three women will die of cardiovascular disease yet risk algorithms were built from male data. She positioned Switzerland -- with its leading research institutions, pharmaceutical industry, and financial infrastructure -- as the natural convener for cross-sector action.
Event Design & Participants
Held under Chatham House Rules at Cure during CSW70, the roundtable brought together 50+ leaders representing the decision-making levers that control how women's health is funded, researched, delivered, and priced. Structured presentations from four sectors -- governance, clinical systems, the pharmaceutical industry, and finance & insurance -- were followed by cross-sector dialogue. The format was built around a single provocation: as each sector presents its constraints, look across the room and ask -- whose decision would unlock yours?
Governance & Policy: Office of the California Surgeon General, Australia's Office for Women, Finnish Ministry of Social Security, WEF Alliance for Global Good, Women At The Table, Gates Foundation, Swiss Federal Office for Gender Equality, Sunny Bates Associates, iHS Strategies, Primus Partners.
Clinical & Health Systems: NYU Langone Health, Mignone Women's Health Collaborative, ETH Zurich, Mount Sinai, Albert Einstein College of Medicine / NYC Health + Hospitals, Magee-Womens Research Institute, Nuttall Women's Health, Deerfield.
Pharma & Life Sciences: Organon, Roche, Merck, Novartis, Ferring, IBSA, Wyss Institute at Harvard, Microsoft AI.
Finance & Insurance: UBS, Swiss Re, Digitalis Ventures, Mubadala, Vontobel, Bank of America, TIAA-Nuveen, Ingeborg Investments, Deloitte, Gender Fair.
Why This Event
For every $100 a health system invests in a man's health, it gets back 2.62 months of life. For a woman, that same $100 buys 1.56 months. That gap -- 40%, measured across 27 OECD nations -- is not biological. It is architectural.
The diagnostic protocols, the drug dosing, the clinical trial data, the screening guidelines, the AI training sets: they were built around male biology as the default. Women enter a system that was not built for them. The cost of that design failure compounds at every stage -- later diagnosis, wrong referrals, missed early intervention -- until it surfaces as the emergency care, the early retirement, and the disability claims that governments, insurers, and employers are already paying for, without understanding why.
Federal Councillor Baume-Schneider grounded this structural failure in clinical specifics in her opening remarks: 78% of autoimmune patients are women yet treatments rarely account for hormonal and immunological differences; nearly two-thirds of Alzheimer's patients are women yet clinical trials were not designed to disaggregate by sex; endometriosis diagnosis is delayed an average of 6.6 to 8.6 years with 75% of women reporting misdiagnosis; and one in three women will die of cardiovascular disease yet the risk algorithms used clinically were developed largely from male data. She called public-private partnership a structural necessity and positioned Switzerland -- with its research institutions, pharmaceutical sector, and financial infrastructure -- as the natural convener.
The economic scale of the women's health gap is now visible. But the problem has resisted solution -- not because any single sector has failed to act, but because the solution requires coordination across sectors that do not normally operate together. Governments set reimbursement frameworks and regulatory standards. Pharmaceutical companies invest in research pipelines based on the incentives they are given. Clinicians deliver care within the guidelines, codes, and time constraints their systems allow. Insurers and financial institutions price risk and allocate capital based on the data available to them. Each is operating rationally within its own mandate. Each sees a part of the problem -- and each can be a part of the solution. But no one sector can fix it alone. And until now, each has been waiting for another to move first.
That is why The Consulate General of Switzerland in New York and FemTechnology co-hosted this event during the 70th Commission on the Status of Women, with Swiss Federal Councillor Elisabeth Baume-Schneider.
Cross-Sector Synthesis
What each sector needs to move.
Every sector holds part of the solution. Each is waiting for another to go first.
| Waiting For | Can Provide | What Would Unlock Them | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Government | Economic evidence to justify expanded coverage | Mandates, reimbursement, regulatory signals | Diagnostic delay cost data per condition per budget line |
| Pharma | Regulatory demand for sex-specific evidence; market size proof | Innovation, treatments, clinical trial data | Sex-specific efficacy standards; reformed health technology assessment |
| Clinical | Updated guidelines and reimbursement matching biology | Patient data, diagnostic expertise, pathway innovation | Screening reform; reimbursement aligned to women's biology |
| Finance | De-risked proof; actuarial models that separate sex from system failure | Capital, risk models, investment instruments | Data that measures diagnostic delay directly (not gender as proxy) |
The pattern: every "unlock" requires the same thing — evidence infrastructure that measures what diagnostic delay costs, in each sector's terms, for each sector's budget lines.
The question we asked every participant: as each sector presents, don't just listen to their challenges. Look across the room and ask yourself -- whose decision would allow you to move?
What You Will Find In This Document
This document synthesizes what emerged from the March 10 dialogue.
Sector findings
For each of the four sectors represented -- governance, clinical systems, pharma, and finance/insurance -- we report what was shared: the structural constraints each sector faces, the data and examples cited, and the innovations already underway.
Ideas for action
After each sector's findings, we identify concrete opportunities for collaboration -- organized from near-term and proven, through initiatives requiring cross-sector coordination, to genuinely new approaches that no single actor has yet attempted.
Synthesis
The cross-cutting themes that emerged across all four sectors, the specific collaboration opportunities that surfaced, and next steps for translating this dialogue into measurable progress.
Who Was In The Room
50+ leaders, selected to represent the decision-making levers that actually control how women's health is funded, researched, delivered, and priced:
Governance and policy. The sector was introduced by Dr. Diana Ramos, California Surgeon General; Ms. Padma Raman, Executive Director of Australia's Office for Women and Head of Delegation for CSW70; and Ms. Laura Rissanen, State Secretary to the Minister of Social Security in Finland. Swiss Federal Councillor Elisabeth Baume-Schneider delivered the opening remarks. These are the people who help establish what gets reimbursed, what data gets collected, and what gets prioritized in public health systems.
Clinical and health systems. The sector was introduced by Dr. Julia Adamian, Clinical Professor of Medicine, Director of Ambulatory Primary Care, Section Chief Division of General Internal Medicine and Clinical Innovations at NYU Langone Health. They were joined by cardiovascular researchers, physician executives, quality officers from major academic medical centers and municipal health systems, and leaders from women's health research institutes. These are the people who see the diagnostic gap daily and who would like to design the care pathways that patients actually experience to be more responsive to their actual needs.
Pharmaceutical and life sciences leaders. The sector was introduced by Ms. Kristen Bridge, VP of R&D Portfolio and Business Operations at Organon. She was joined by general managers and R&D leaders from global pharmaceutical companies, researchers from leading biomedical institutes, and innovators working at the intersection of AI and life sciences. These are the people who help decide what gets researched, what gets developed, and what reaches patients.
Finance, insurance, and investment leaders. The sector was introduced by Ms. Marianna Mamou, Head of Advice Beyond Investing at UBS, and Ms. Kimberly Poulopoulos, SVP and Head of Mortality Innovation & Transformation at Swiss Re. They were joined by senior leaders from sovereign wealth funds, venture capital firms, global banks, asset managers, consultancies, and philanthropic institutions dedicated to women's health. These are the people who price risk, allocate capital, design financial products, and determine what gets funded at scale.
Convening and research partners, including journalists, innovation accelerators, and leaders from global organizations working at the intersection of health, gender, economics, AI, and policy.
The Swiss Ecosystem: Unique Positioning
In Switzerland, health insurance, disability insurance, old-age pensions, and gender equality policy all fall under a single federal department -- the Federal Department of Home Affairs FDHA, headed by Federal Councillor Elisabeth Baume-Schneider, who co-hosted this event. That means the costs of diagnostic delay do not just appear in one budget. A woman who is diagnosed late may cost the health insurer more, draw on disability support earlier, exit the workforce sooner, and accumulate pension costs over a longer retirement. The structural possibility of tracing that full cascade -- from a missed diagnosis to its downstream fiscal impact across health, disability, and pension systems -- exists within a single department's mandate.
Switzerland also concentrates the institutional assets to act on what it finds. ETH Zurich and EPFL are among the top research universities in Europe. A government-supported, multi-university initiative has developed a national core program for gender medicine and updated the National Learning Catalog with gender medicine learning objectives. Novartis and Roche anchor a pharmaceutical ecosystem with global reach. UBS, Swiss Re, Zurich and Vontobel represent the financial and insurance infrastructure needed to design new instruments, reprice risk, and mobilize capital.
And Switzerland has two live policy windows. TARDOC, the new outpatient tariff system that replaced TARMED in January 2026, is reshaping how outpatient care is billed. EFAS, the uniform financing reform approved by Swiss voters in November 2024, will restructure how costs are shared between cantons and insurers starting in 2028 -- the implementation framework is being designed now. Together, these reforms create a rare opportunity to embed sex-differentiated cost modeling and women's health pathway analysis into Switzerland's reimbursement architecture while the system is still being built.
Finally, Switzerland has something harder to replicate than institutions: a tradition of neutral convening. The fact that this dialogue was convened by the Swiss Consulate, co-hosted by a Federal Councillor, with leaders from five countries and every major sector in the room, is itself a demonstration of what that tradition can produce when directed at a specific structural challenge.
Governance & Policy
What Moves When Government Mandates It
Government leaders from three continents described remarkably convergent experiences: governance frameworks are powerful enablers, but only when they mandate action rather than recommend it.
What was shared
Dr. Diana Ramos, California Surgeon General described using maternal mortality -- where 80% of deaths are preventable -- as the entry point for lifelong cardiovascular health monitoring. California is now mandating health data exchange accountability across all government-funded prenatal care. The insight: pregnancy complications, including preeclampsia, carry a 60%+ lifetime cardiovascular risk. Pregnancy is not just a reproductive event -- it is a window into future health. She identified transparency, accountability, and equity as the three non-negotiable governance requirements, and emphasized that 80% of health outcomes are determined outside the healthcare setting.
Pregnancy as a Cardiovascular Window
Ms. Padma Raman, Executive Director of Australia's Office for Women and Head of Delegation for CSW70, described embedding gender analysis into all government policy proposals, supported by a national women's health strategy. She highlighted the compounding nature of disadvantage for indigenous women and girls, and the need for both universal and culturally informed responses. Community-led models -- such as birthing programs designed by and for indigenous communities -- are proving more effective than top-down interventions. Significant public investment has been directed toward reducing cost barriers for women's access across the life course, including essential medicines, primary care, mental health, and reproductive healthcare.
Ms. Laura Rissanen, State Secretary to the Minister of Social Security in Finland, reported that her government passed one of Europe's most advanced health data laws, mandating sex-disaggregated data collection across national registries. A dedicated women's health innovation hub in Turku, connecting pharma, biotech, universities, and health providers, has received parliamentary funding. The current Finnish government has, for the first time, recognized menopause in policy and enacted occupational health guidelines for it. Most significantly, a Nordic charter adopted in December 2025 sets a concrete, time-bound target: parity in healthy life years between women and men by 2040.
A former national cabinet minister from a major emerging economy identified a critical funding gap at the intersection of maternal health and cardiovascular health: research linking pregnancy complications to lifelong cardiovascular risk remains underfunded because funders treat these as separate domains. She reported that AI systems are currently resulting in women receiving significantly less medical care support than men, and that closing the health gap would add $22 billion to her country's GDP alone. Her challenge to the room: the numbers speak for themselves -- so why is the gap not being bridged?
Three governance lessons that emerged
- Sex-disaggregated data collection must become a baseline legal standard -- not a best practice, not a voluntary reporting option. The Finnish and Nordic experiences demonstrate this is achievable.
- Women's health policy spans labor, social protection, innovation, and finance. Governance structures that silo it under 'health' will only ever address a fraction of the problem.
- Charters, strategies, and targets only work if someone is accountable for delivering them.
Open Questions & Ideas for Action
Replicate the Nordic data mandate model
Finland's experience demonstrates that mandating sex-disaggregated data collection across national registries is achievable and produces a data infrastructure that researchers, companies, and policymakers can build on. The Nordic Charter's 2040 parity target provides a framework other nations could adapt.
Use pregnancy as a cardiovascular risk stratification event
The evidence linking pregnancy complications to lifelong cardiovascular risk is strong. Mandating cardiovascular follow-up pathways for women with histories of preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, or preterm birth would catch conditions decades earlier -- at a fraction of the cost of late-stage intervention.
Cross-ministerial women's health governance
The siloed treatment of women's health across health, labor, finance, and social protection ministries was identified as a structural barrier. Establishing cross-ministerial coordination mechanisms -- as Finland has begun doing -- would allow policies to reflect the full economic and social footprint of the gap.
Intergovernmental alignment on sex-specific evidence standards
The Access Consortium, OECD health platforms, and Nordic Council of Ministers are all potential vehicles for establishing common regulatory standards for sex-specific clinical evidence. Convergence here would create a competitive advantage for countries and companies that adopt the standards early.
Mapping the invisible value gap in women's health
The women's health gap is the cumulative result of imprecision at every stage: screening guidelines that miss the window for early intervention, diagnostic protocols that don't match women's presentation, referral pathways built around a different patient, drug dosing calibrated on male physiology, reimbursement codes that undervalue chronic conditions relative to acute ones, and AI systems trained on all of these inherited biases. Each one adds cost. Together, they compound into a system that spends dramatically more to achieve less. No government, health system, or insurer currently has complete visibility into where this value is being lost -- in which pathways, for which conditions, in which budget lines. The methodology to build that visibility now exists: tracking where clinical friction occurs, where care pathways break down, and translating that into condition-specific fiscal impact. What is needed are institutional partners willing to pilot this inside a real system -- pick a condition, pick a pathway, and measure what imprecision actually costs. The first institution to do this will have something no one currently has -- and everyone needs.
AI governance standards for sex-specific clinical tool validation
Healthcare AI tools are being deployed into clinical decision support, triage, and resource allocation at scale -- often without validation for sex-specific accuracy. As these systems become embedded in care delivery, the biases they carry become harder and more expensive to reverse. Establishing standards for sex-specific validation before deployment -- not after -- would be a first-mover advantage for any government or regulatory body willing to lead. Several frameworks for this work already exist, including published research on epistemic bias in healthcare AI. What is missing is the regulatory will to require it.
Clinical & Health Systems
The Infrastructure of Missed Diagnosis
What was shared
Women are 50% more likely to receive an initial misdiagnosis during a heart attack, and across over 700 diseases, women are diagnosed significantly later than men -- four years on average. Clinicians don't need to be told this gap exists. They need the policy, the diagnostic codes, and the reimbursement models to catch up with the biology of the patients actually in front of them.
Clinical leaders confirmed this. Dr. Julia Adamian of NYU Langone identified a pattern across multiple conditions: screening guidelines systematically lag behind biological reality for women. Osteoporosis screening begins at age 65, while bone health decline starts in the mid-40s to 50s during menopause. There are no standardized screening protocols for menopause itself, despite the fact that 40% of women's lives will be spent in menopause, and menopause is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Ovarian cancer has no routine screening and most insurance does not cover it, while prostate cancer screening is covered. She called the shift from reactive to proactive healthcare the single most important structural change needed, framing screening not as an expense but as an investment.
Clinical & Health Systems
When risk begins vs. when screening starts.
The gap between biological reality and clinical response — in years.
A cardiovascular researcher at another major medical center described breaking clinical silos by connecting specialists who have never been brought together. Small vessel disease -- which disproportionately affects women -- manifests in both cardiovascular and Alzheimer's disease, and the only place to image small vessels is in the eye. Her institution is now using genetic tests for Alzheimer's to study cardiovascular disease and vice versa, examining polygenic risk scores alongside retinal imaging. She described creating postpartum high-risk pathways to identify links between pregnancy complications and long-term hypertension and heart failure, and midlife transition pathways for menopause-related cardiovascular risk.
Breaking Clinical Silos
Same mechanism, three specialties, zero coordination.
Small vessel disease disproportionately affects women — and falls between specialties.
Small Vessel Disease
Shared underlying mechanism | Predominantly affects women
What one institution is doing:
Using Alzheimer's genetic tests to study cardiovascular disease. Examining retinal imaging alongside polygenic risk scores. Connecting specialists who have never been in the same room.
A physician executive from a major municipal health system shared a striking finding: when an equity lens was applied to completed quality improvement projects -- projects that had already met their aims -- one in five had generated an intervention-driven inequity that would have gone undetected without disaggregated analysis. The inequities appeared across sex, BMI, and language preference. The implication: even well-designed improvement initiatives can widen gaps when data is not disaggregated.
A leader at one of the world's premier medical education institutions identified the upstream bottleneck: it takes 10 to 15 years for new knowledge to reach the medical curriculum. Switzerland has moved faster by developing a national gender medicine curriculum and updating its national learning catalog with gender medicine learning objectives. But the broader point stands: the physicians who will redesign the system need to be trained differently before they enter it.
The reimbursement crisis in women's health was stated bluntly by the leader of a major women's health research institute: young physicians are actively being told not to go into women's health because there is no money in it. Their midlife center has more patients than doctors, and the problem is worsening.
Young physicians are actively being told not to go into women's health because there is no money in it. Their midlife center has more patients than doctors, and the problem is worsening.
Leader of a major women's health research institute
Open Questions & Ideas for Action
Update screening guidelines to match biological reality
The mismatch between when conditions begin and when screening is covered represents billions in avoidable late-stage costs. Osteoporosis, menopause-related cardiovascular risk, and ovarian cancer are immediate candidates. The case for each is already evidence-based; what is missing is the reimbursement and regulatory alignment to act on it.
Equity-lens auditing of quality improvement initiatives
The finding that one in five completed quality improvement projects generated hidden inequities suggests a systemic blind spot. Mandating disaggregated outcome analysis in all QI and health system reform initiatives is a low-cost, high-impact intervention that any health system could implement immediately.
Cross-specialty clinical hubs for shared-mechanism conditions
Conditions that share biological mechanisms across traditional specialty boundaries -- such as small vessel disease appearing in cardiovascular, neurological, and retinal contexts -- are systematically missed when specialties operate in silos. Building multi-specialty diagnostic hubs, anchored around shared biological mechanisms rather than organ systems, could dramatically accelerate diagnosis for conditions that disproportionately affect women.
Pregnancy-to-cardiovascular longitudinal pathways
Linking obstetric data to lifelong cardiovascular monitoring creates a prevention infrastructure that catches conditions decades before they become emergencies. Multiple institutions in the room are building versions of this. Standardizing the approach and embedding it in reimbursement would scale it.
Medical education reform at the curriculum level
Gender medicine cannot remain a post-graduate elective or an add-on module. Embedding it in core medical training -- as Switzerland has begun doing through a national learning catalog update -- would change the generation of physicians entering practice.
A system-level map of where women's care pathways actually break down
Every clinical insight shared in the room pointed to the same structural problem: the system cannot see its own failure. Each encounter -- the dismissed symptom, the wrong referral, the delayed diagnosis -- is coded independently. No one connects the full patient journey. A woman who sees five providers over seven years before receiving an endometriosis diagnosis generates five separate clinical records, none of which flags the pattern. The cost of that fragmented journey -- the repeat visits, the unnecessary imaging, the escalating acuity -- is invisible to the system that produced it. The infrastructure to change this is now technically feasible. By connecting encounters across the care journey and surfacing where pathways diverge from evidence-based standards -- for specific conditions, in specific populations, within specific systems -- it becomes possible to show a health system not just that women are diagnosed later, but exactly where in their system that delay occurs, which handoff fails, and what that failure costs per patient per year. This would transform the abstract claim that the system is 40% less efficient for women into specific, actionable intelligence that a hospital CFO, a payer, or a ministry of health can act on. The institutions that build or adopt this kind of pathway intelligence first will be able to redesign care around where it actually fails -- not where they assume it does.
Pharma & Life Sciences
The Innovation Desert
What was shared
Pharmaceutical companies are building the future of medicine on an incomplete foundation. Clinical trials historically underrepresented women, and drugs are still calibrated on male physiology. Women experience adverse drug reactions at nearly twice the rate of men. As AI accelerates drug discovery, there is a risk of training algorithms on those same male-default datasets, hard-coding yesterday's blind spots into tomorrow's medicine.
Ms. Kristen Bridge of Organon specifically focused on women's health described three systemic barriers: underinvestment, regulatory complexity, and a lack of ecosystem coordination. Her company's response has been to create an accelerator program that provides development expertise to smaller biotechs that lack the resources to advance women's health innovations independently. She emphasized that pharmaceuticals cannot solve the problem alone, it requires coordination across academia, biotech, venture capital, regulatory bodies, and government.
A pharmaceutical general manager identified a critical gap in health-economic evaluation: the invisible costs of not treating women are never counted. When a woman is misdiagnosed or undertreated, she is removed from the workforce, from caregiving, from her community, and none of that shows up in the cost-effectiveness analysis that determines whether an innovative medicine is adopted. She argued for a fundamental shift: stop counting the cost of treating women, and start counting the cost of ignoring them.
Stop counting the cost of treating women, and start counting the cost of ignoring them.
Pharmaceutical general manager
Another pharmaceutical leader raised the access delay problem: even after regulatory approval, innovative medications can take years to reach patients in wealthy countries. She called for political courage to grant access from day one and work out the financing afterward, a model used in some European markets and beginning to be adopted more broadly.
The Most Fundamental Gap
A leader from a major research institution spoke to the most fundamental gap of all: science still does not fully understand female biology. Researchers lack access to biological samples. Non-animal models, precision medicine tools, and shared biological libraries remain underdeveloped for women's physiology. She proposed pre-competitive research models where the pharma, clinical, and reimbursement barriers are set aside entirely in favor of advancing foundational knowledge about how women's bodies work.
Open Questions & Ideas for Action
Ecosystem accelerators for women's health biotech
The model of established pharmaceutical companies providing development infrastructure to under-resourced biotechs is already working. Expanding this across more companies and more therapeutic areas -- especially beyond reproductive health into autoimmune, neurodegenerative, and cardiovascular conditions -- would unlock a pipeline that venture capital alone cannot sustain.
Embed indirect costs in health-economic evaluations
Current health technology assessments exclude the economic impact of undertreated women leaving the workforce, losing caregiving capacity, and accumulating avoidable morbidity. Reforming evaluation methodologies to capture these costs would change the business case for investing in women's health innovation overnight.
Day-one access models for approved innovations
The multi-year gap between regulatory approval and patient access is costing lives and generating exactly the kind of avoidable acute-stage costs that governments are trying to reduce. Scaling day-one access frameworks -- with outcome-based risk-sharing between industry and payers -- would align the incentives.
Pre-competitive data consortia for sex-specific evidence
Pharmaceutical companies, research institutions, and governments all have fragments of the sex-specific data needed to build better drugs and diagnostics. Evidence-sharing frameworks that allow firms to pool sex-specific data while protecting proprietary value -- similar to rare disease consortia -- would accelerate the entire field.
A foundational biology initiative for female physiology
The room heard a direct challenge: we do not fundamentally know how the whole female body works. A coordinated, pre-competitive research initiative -- analogous to the Human Genome Project in ambition -- focused on filling the basic biological knowledge gap in female physiology would transform every downstream application: drug development, AI training data, diagnostic tools, screening protocols. This is not incremental. It is the missing foundation that everything else is built on.
AI-ready sex-specific drug response databases
As AI transforms drug discovery, the training data determines the outcomes. Building curated, validated databases of sex-specific drug metabolism, adverse reactions, and dosing requirements -- available as a shared resource for AI-driven R&D -- would prevent the next generation of medicines from inheriting the biases of the last.
Finance & Insurance
Repricing Risk, Redesigning Capital
The $1T Capital Bottleneck
What was shared
Insurers price risk and banks manage long-term wealth, but both have a massive blind spot when it comes to women's health. The system assumes that women will inevitably become sicker as they age and prices that expectation into insurance models, investment decisions, and public spending. In reality, much of that excess morbidity is the result of delayed diagnosis and missed early intervention. The institutions that recognize this first will gain the most.
Ms. Marianna Mamou of UBS laid out the economic reality: half of women's health burden occurs during their working years, reducing productivity and earnings potential. One in ten women exits the workforce during menopause at the peak of their career and earnings. Women face higher medical costs, save less for retirement, and need their savings to stretch longer. Yet only 6% of private healthcare investment goes to women's health, and half of femtech startups remain stuck at seed stage unable to scale.
She outlined a capital mobilization framework: philanthropy to de-risk early innovation, blended finance and catalytic capital to validate proof of concept, then private markets and institutional capital to scale proven solutions. For every dollar invested in improving women's health, approximately three dollars of economic growth could be generated globally. She positioned Switzerland -- at the intersection of science, finance, and global governance -- as uniquely suited to transform women's health from an overlooked issue to a structured investment theme.
The False Actuarial Proxy
Models observe higher healthcare utilization and later-stage emergency claims by women. They price this as inherent biological risk and charge higher premiums.
The Structural Reality
The true driver of high claims is not biology, but systemic diagnostic delay. Miscalculating this prevents insurers from investing in low-cost, early-detection prevention.
Ms. Kimberly Poulopoulos of Swiss Re offered a perspective that reframed the entire incentive structure: life and health insurers operate on a decades-long horizon, making them uniquely sensitive to early and midlife health trajectories. Unlike most healthcare actors, insurers have directly aligned incentives with policyholders -- if women live longer and healthier, both parties benefit. Yet the industry currently treats pregnancy as a pre-existing condition, increases rates for postpartum depression, and uses family history of breast and ovarian cancer to raise premiums rather than leveraging that knowledge to support prevention.
She proposed a fundamental shift from risk pricing to risk prevention: using underwriting data as a window into future health to educate and support policyholders, not penalize them. Life insurance companies are already beginning to offer multi-cancer early detection testing -- screening for 50+ cancers -- to policyholders, because catching disease earlier benefits everyone in the equation. The core message: insurance doesn't own care delivery, but it owns the long view. And from that long view, not investing in women's health is a compounding risk.
Insurance doesn't own care delivery, but it owns the long view. And from that long view, not investing in women's health is a compounding risk.
Ms. Kimberly Poulopoulos, Swiss Re
The Bias Tax: A Self-Reinforcing Cycle
Diagnostic delay creates a vicious cycle that inflates costs for everyone. The system penalizes what it created.
A venture capital leader proposed a structural insight: work backwards through the capital continuum. Define what insurers will pay for -- because that defines the market. Pharma wants to buy products with large markets. Venture invests in what pharma will acquire. Philanthropy and basic research want to see that capital pathway before committing resources. Aligning these different definitions of return on investment is the key to unlocking coordinated investment.
A philanthropic leader described a 200,000-square-foot facility dedicated entirely to women's health, anchored by a vitality center focused on keeping women healthy rather than treating them when they are sick. She asked the question the room had been circling: what are the critical health milestones at every stage of a woman's life that the system should be designed around?
Finance & Insurance
The compounding financial penalty.
Each step makes the next one worse. This is not seven separate problems — it is one cascade.
The system charges women more for worse care, pushes them out of the workforce earlier, and leaves them with less to retire on. This is not a social issue — it is a mispricing of risk across the entire financial chain.
Swiss Supplementary Insurance: The Gender Premium
Switzerland is the only country in Europe where supplementary health insurance charges women more than men.
Switzerland is the only country in Europe where supplementary insurance charges women higher premiums than men
New outpatient tariff system (Jan 2026) creates a window to embed sex-differentiated cost modeling
Uniform financing reform (2028) will restructure cost-sharing between cantons and insurers -- being designed now
The question: how much of the higher cost reflects biology, and how much reflects a system that diagnoses women later and routes them through more expensive late-stage pathways?
The Pension Gap Waterfall
How women retire with 30-40% less: each factor compounds, and two-thirds of pensioners in poverty are women.
Women face a compounding financial penalty. In the US, women on employer-sponsored health plans pay 18% more in out-of-pocket costs. In Switzerland, supplementary insurance charges women more than men -- the only country in Europe to do so. Women globally retire with 30-40% less in pension savings, and two-thirds of pensioners in poverty are women. The system charges women more for worse care, pushes them out of the workforce earlier, and leaves them with less to retire on. This is not a social issue -- it is a mispricing of risk across the entire financial chain.
Open Questions & Ideas for Action
Insurance-funded early detection programs
Multi-cancer early detection, postpartum cardiovascular monitoring, and menopause-related health screening are immediate candidates for insurer-funded prevention programs. Life insurers have directly aligned incentives: earlier detection means longer, healthier premium-paying lives. This requires no regulatory change -- just institutional will.
Break the "no exits" myth
At least 27 unicorn exits have occurred in women's health, but many were not classified or tagged as such -- they sat in oncology, diagnostics, or other categories. Producing an authoritative mapping of women's health investment returns would directly address the most common objection institutional investors raise.
Working backwards through the capital continuum
The venture capital insight -- that aligning what insurers will pay for, what pharmaceutical companies will acquire, and what venture will fund creates a coherent investment thesis -- is actionable now but requires the sectors to be in the room together. A structured initiative that maps this alignment for 3-5 specific women's health conditions would produce a replicable model.
Gender-specific financial products and retirement solutions
Women's different health trajectories, earnings patterns, and longevity profiles require financial products designed around them -- not retrofitted from male-default models. Annuities, health-linked savings vehicles, and insurance products that reflect women's actual risk and spending profiles would address the retirement adequacy crisis at its source.
Reframe actuarial models to separate sex from system failure
Current actuarial models use gender as a proxy for variables -- like diagnostic delay -- that they have never measured directly. The result: being female is treated as the risk factor, when the real risk factor is a system that diagnoses women too late. Updating these models with data on actual diagnostic pathways would allow insurers to price risk more accurately and premium-setters to stop penalizing women for system failures.
A population-level health intelligence layer for women's health
Today's actuarial models, insurance premiums, and investment theses in women's health are largely built on data that doesn't distinguish between the patient and the system around her. In practice, sex can inadvertently function as a proxy for variables the models don't measure directly. In Switzerland, women pay more for supplementary health insurance -- but how much of that higher cost reflects biology, and how much reflects a system that takes longer to diagnose and routes women through more expensive late-stage pathways? When an insurer raises a premium based on a family history of breast or ovarian cancer, is it pricing the genetic risk or the absence of early detection infrastructure? The data to answer these questions largely doesn't exist yet -- and that matters differently for each actor in the financial chain:
For reinsurers:
Reinsurers set the terms that shape what primary insurers do. By building prevention-oriented conditions into reinsurance contracts -- for example, favorable terms for insurers that fund early detection programs or adopt pathway-level risk data -- reinsurers can catalyze the shift across the entire insurance market without requiring each insurer to make the case independently. The multi-cancer early detection testing already being offered to policyholders is an early example of what this could look like at scale.
For primary insurers:
Pathway-level data would allow insurers to distinguish between risk that reflects biology and risk that reflects system failure -- and to price accordingly. An insurer willing to explore whether this data changes what their models see would be testing a fundamentally different approach to women's health risk, one where prevention becomes more profitable than pricing in expected decline.
For banks and wealth managers:
Women retire with 30-40% less in pension savings, and two-thirds of pensioners in poverty are women. Pathway-level health data could inform whether earlier health intervention shifts retirement timing -- turning what is currently modeled as demographic inevitability into something financial planning can actually address. Products designed around women's actual health and earnings trajectories, rather than retrofitted from male-default models, represent an underserved market.
What Coordination Could Unlock
Four themes emerged consistently across every sector:
1. The Data Gap Is the Root Cause
Every sector identified the absence of sex-disaggregated data as the foundational barrier. Finland demonstrated that mandating it is achievable. Australia is investing in longitudinal tracking. A major municipal health system showed that even completed quality projects can generate hidden inequities without disaggregated analysis. The direction was consistent: sex-disaggregated data collection works best when embedded in regulation rather than left to voluntary adoption.
2. AI Is Amplifying Existing Bias
Healthcare is adopting AI 2.2 times faster than the rest of the economy. But AI systems trained on male-default datasets risk encoding and scaling the very biases the room spent the morning identifying. Research has shown that leading language models, when summarizing identical care cases, describe men's needs as more complex and urgent than women's -- the same condition producing different language, different resource allocation. For employers, insurers, and governments relying on AI-driven health platforms, this is an emerging liability.
3. Reimbursement Architecture Is the Binding Constraint
From the US (where misaligned reimbursement is driving physicians away from women's health) to parts of Europe (where access to approved medications is delayed for years) to Switzerland (where women pay more for supplementary insurance than men), financing models were identified as the mechanism through which structural bias is maintained.
4. The Cost of Inaction Is Quantifiable
Every sector identified specific, measurable costs -- not as equity arguments, but as fiscal realities already appearing in their budgets, claims data, and workforce projections.
What the synthesis reveals is that the action pathways detailed in each sector section above -- from screening reform to pre-competitive research to pathway-level financial data -- all depend on the same underlying need: evidence infrastructure that connects what is currently fragmented and makes the invisible visible. The specific ideas for building that infrastructure are in the sector sections. The question now is who moves first.
Next Steps
FemTechnology is committed to ensuring the momentum from March 10 translates into measurable progress and invites all participants to:
- Share connections, ideas, or collaboration proposals that emerged from the event with FemTechnology to help translate these insights into scalable, evidence-based approaches.
- Express interest in pilot partnerships to apply the frameworks discussed at the event -- whether that means quantifying the cost of diagnostic delay within a specific system, redesigning screening and care pathways to reflect women's biology, building sex-specific evidence into AI tools and clinical decision support, or developing financial instruments and risk models that reflect actual health trajectories rather than outdated proxies. FemTechnology is available to support this work and happy to facilitate connections across the network that emerged from this dialogue.
- Identify cross-sector working groups where coordination between participants could accelerate progress -- whether on diagnostic delay economics, AI governance, insurance-led prevention, regulatory alignment, or the foundational biology initiative.
- Connect us or other participating institutions to stakeholders not yet in this network who hold levers relevant to the action pathways identified in this document.
The individuals holding the necessary levers were in the same room on March 10. The question now is what we build with that.
Appendix: Participating Leaders
Expertise from the following organizations participated in the March 10 roundtable.
Hosts & Conveners
Consulate General of Switzerland in New York | FemTechnology | Cure
Governance & Policy
Office of the California Surgeon General | Australia's Office for Women | Finnish Ministry of Social Security | WEF Alliance for Global Good | Women At The Table | Gates Foundation | Swiss Federal Office for Gender Equality | Sunny Bates Associates | iHS Strategies | Primus Partners
Clinical & Health Systems
NYU Langone Health | ETH Zurich | Mount Sinai | Albert Einstein College of Medicine / NYC Health + Hospitals | Magee-Womens Research Institute | Mignone Women's Health Collaborative (NYU Langone) | Nuttall Women's Health | Deerfield
Pharma & Life Sciences
Organon | Roche Pharmaceuticals | Merck | Novartis | Ferring Pharmaceuticals | IBSA | Wyss Institute at Harvard University | Microsoft AI
Finance & Insurance
UBS | Swiss Re | Digitalis Ventures | Mubadala Investment Company | Vontobel | Bank of America | TIAA-Nuveen | Ingeborg Investments | Deloitte | Gender Fair
Research & Innovation
ETH AI Center | ETH Zurich | Wyss Institute at Harvard University
About The Consulate General of Switzerland in New York
The Consulate General of Switzerland in New York is the official representation of the Swiss Federal Government in New York, serving 18 states and territories. It promotes Switzerland's interests and values across trade, innovation, culture, and science. The United States has been Switzerland's largest export market since 2021, and Switzerland is the sixth-largest foreign direct investor in the US, with Swiss companies directly creating about 400,000 American jobs. The Consulate serves as a key entry point for strengthening Swiss-American ties across finance, research, technology, and the arts.
About FemTechnology
FemTechnology builds the infrastructure to make women's health economically visible. Through its platform ORI, FemTechnology tracks where clinical friction occurs -- where symptoms are dismissed, diagnoses delayed, or care pathways break down -- and generates economic evidence from lived experience. This "Barrier Data" turns systemic patterns into actionable intelligence for health systems, insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and governments seeking to quantify and address the cost of diagnostic delay. FemTechnology's research has been published in Nature Reviews Bioengineering on epistemic bias in healthcare AI. Its research portfolio spans the economic, clinical, AI, longevity, and workplace dimensions of the women's health gap.
About Cure
If interested in learning more about Cure, please contact:
Kathryn T. MacGovern
Director of Experiential Events & Sales
212.692.7116
345 Park Avenue South, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10010