The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) on Thursday released a long-awaited and congressionally mandated report assessing the state of women’s health research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Titled “A Vision for Women’s Health Research: Transformative Change at the National Institutes of Health,” the report offers an urgent critique of NIH’s approach to women’s health and provides a roadmap for addressing the persistent gaps.
The committee’s findings revealed that despite the NIH’s expanding budget over the past decade, only 8.8% of NIH research spending from fiscal years 2013 to 2023 targeted women’s health research. This share has decreased as a proportion of overall NIH research funding, even as the agency received steady budget increases during the same period. Further, the committee found that the Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) within NIH remains underfunded and that “breakthroughs to improve women’s health have lagged across the research enterprise.”
NASEM Calls On Gaps and Missed Opportunities
The report underscores longstanding gaps in understanding female-specific conditions, such as uterine fibroids and endometriosis, and how life events like pregnancy can affect a woman’s long-term health. It also highlights why the committee believes women’s health research has been stagnant, including research addressing the intersection of sex and other factors such as race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, which are critical to understanding disparities in health outcomes and inadequate coordinating women’s health research across its Institutes and Centers.
NASEM’s Recommendations
To address these gaps, the NASEM committee recommended that Congress appropriate $15.7 billion over five years—doubling NIH’s average investment in women’s health research. Among the committee’s policy recommendations is creating an interdisciplinary women’s health research fund to drive innovative research that cuts across multiple health domains. A full list of recommendations can be found in the report here.
The NIH, in response to the NASEM report, released a statement saying the report does not accurately reflect all of the agency’s efforts in women’s health:
“While the report provides thoughtful recommendations on how NIH can expand its research efforts, it does not acknowledge the full breadth of NIH’s extensive work on women’s health research. It omits the key congressional language that establishes the study of gynecological and pregnancy-related conditions at NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and it understates the significance of ongoing women’s health initiatives supported by NICHD and other NIH institutes.” – NIH Statement on NASEM Report on Women’s Health Research
The Society for Women’s Health Research looks forward to continuing conversations across the women’s health research community, with the NIH and with Congress, to determine which recommendations might be most actionable to best integrate and prioritize women’s health research across the NIH so that increased attention and resources can close the gender health gap.