Why Women Spend the Last 5–6 Years of Life in Worse Health Than Men (And What to Do About It)

Ovaries are like a second brain. They talk to my heart, my bone, my muscle, my brain for sure, my liver. Almost every tissue in the female body is somehow connected to a variant signaling. The message is that ovaries are the architects of health in female bodies and also the pacemakers for aging. And so reproductive aging is really just intrinsic aging in reproductive organs that impairs fertility or fecundity, really just basically impairs your ability to reproduce aging ovaries drives aging and the rest of the body for women understanding what your normal is across time is probably the most important and most powerful thing that you can do women are desperate for answers how and why do ovaries age faster that's the key question for female health the idea that female bodies are noisy or that our cycles make things difficult to interpret that's just bullshit

Jen, welcome.

Thank you.

So I wanted to start today with just some very high-level statistics that I'd love you to tell me if

they're

correct or not, because this is kind of frightening. Only around 8% to 9% of NIH research funding is dedicated to women's health research.

Correct. Is

that correct?

That's correct,

yeah. 8% to 9%?

Somewhere, you know, it hovers. It changes every year, but it hovers around 10%.

only 5% of health R&D funding goes to women's

health. Yes, I might even say 4%. Yeah, that's correct.

And of that, it says here, 4% goes to women's cancers, just 1% towards all other female-specific conditions, menopause, endometriosis, PCOS, and infertility.

Well, it depends on which funding you're talking about. So if you're talking about private investment, for the last five years, you have to look at the historic data, for the last five years, That's approximately in the ballpark. Something like 4% of all the investment has gone to everything except female cancers, fertility, and maternal-fetal health. So that means that more than 95% of the investment has gone to those three areas. And everything else, quite literally everything else related to women's health is in that little tiny bucket.

I mean, help me and the audience understand why that might have happened.

I mean, OK, well, I think I think at this stage of the game, we're all familiar with the historical bias in research in terms of like sex bias towards male systems. like historic underfunding, right? So the underfunding really leads to this massive gap in data that we have. And I think that, you know, until recently, there was a real taboo around talking about female bodies, right? We didn't talk about pregnancy. We didn't talk about menstruation. Certainly from my mother and her mother talking to her would never have talked about, you know, Any of these things. And so that's changed and everything is changing in a positive direction. But, and I would say I, I like to, um, a dear friend, uh, CJ Jenkins likes to say, let's stop admiring the problem and actually just like fix it.

Deal with it. Yeah. We just, are we playing catch up now? Do you think?

I would say we're generations behind where we need to be. So we're missing an extraordinary amount of data on female bodies. I like to call it a puzzle that we haven't yet solved.

Does that have