This paints a long and bleak picture, but it’s one built from thousands of collective first-person accounts women have given on podcasts, in news reports, and free text entries in the Women’s Health Strategy survey run in England in 2021.

When it comes to health care, women are second-class citizens. They have poorer access to health care, and receive incorrect or delayed diagnoses and less effective treatments than men. Despite living longer, the average woman spends nearly a quarter of her life in poor health compared with a fifth for men, according to a Public Health England report. The UK currently has the largest gender health gap in the G20, and the 12th largest globally.

At its root, the gender health gap is a research and data gap. “Historically, it stems from a patriarchal bias in society,” says Jennifer Garrison, an assistant professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in California. “That’s the bottom line for all of this. This is evidenced by a major lack of funding to study female bodies, both for clinical and basic research, and if there’s no funding then scientists can’t work on those questions—that’s where we find ourselves now.”

The data is sobering: Less than 2.5 percent of publicly funded research is dedicated solely to reproductive health, despite the fact that one in three women in the UK will suffer from a reproductive or gynecological health problem. There is five times more research conducted on erectile dysfunction, which affects 19 percent of men, than on premenstrual syndrome, which affects 90 percent of women.

This is down to a number of factors. Firstly, men continue to outnumber women in most medical specialties, and in some of the largest specialties there are three times as many men as women. Secondly, according to Michelle Griffin, a women’s health expert and strategy adviser in women’s health tech, women’s health is not considered a “sexy” specialism among this gender-imbalanced research community. “It’s not seen to be interesting, dynamic, or innovative enough, not only in the startup health-tech digital space, but in much more basic medical research—literally what’s going into the textbooks,” she says. “What I got taught … at medical school 20 years ago is exactly the same as what they got taught … yesterday, which is exactly the same as what they got taught about 40 years ago. It’s not a fast-paced, evolving space, and that’s because research isn’t being done.”

Thirdly, money goes where the noise is. The past few years have signaled a step change in the conversation around menopause, with books like Maisie Hill’s Perimenopause Power and Davina McCall’s show Sex, Myths and the Menopause on Channel 4 in the UK. The British government has appointed its first Menopause Employment Champion and included menopause in the National Curriculum. Brands and celebrities have taken note, too, prompting what’s become known as the “menopause gold rush”—$50 vaginal hydrating gel from Naomi Watts’ holistic menopause brand, Stripes, anyone? And as menopause gets more openly discussed, VCs are coming to understand the huge absence of information and support—and thus the opportunity—for women during this fundamental physiological and psychological shift, the symptoms of which last four to five years on average but can go on for 14.