If you've ever been dismissed by a doctor, waited years for a diagnosis, or been told your symptoms were just stress, you're not imagining a pattern. Women's health has been systematically underfunded and understudied for decades, and the consequences show up in real, daily ways.
Yes, and the numbers are more stark than most people realize.
A 2024 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that only 8.8% of NIH research spending from 2013 to 2023 was directed at women's health, and that share actually decreased over the decade even as the NIH's overall budget grew. Women represent just over half the US population. The research investment does not come close to reflecting that.
Why were women excluded from medical research for so long?
For most of the twentieth century, the male body was treated as the medical default. Women were formally excluded from many clinical trials following the thalidomide crisis of the 1960s, when the FDA introduced a blanket restriction on including women of childbearing age in early-phase trials. The intent was protection; the practical effect was decades of drugs, dosing guidelines, and treatment protocols built entirely on male data.
The NIH Revitalization Act of 1993 required the inclusion of women in NIH-funded research, but the legacy of exclusion persisted. A 2025 analysis in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that even across phase 3 clinical trials registered between 2000 and 2024, women remained underrepresented relative to their share of the population in several key therapeutic areas. The assumption that findings from male subjects generalize to women has proven costly.
What does underfunding actually cost women?
The clearest example is drug dosing. When women metabolize medication differently from men and those differences aren't studied, the result is real harm. A widely cited case involved zolpidem (Ambien): dosing guidelines were based on male data, and women experienced significantly higher rates of next-morning impairment as a result. The FDA ultimately cut the recommended dose for women by half. That correction came after the drug had already been in use for years.
Conditions that exclusively or predominantly affect women are some of the most severely underfunded relative to their disease burden. A 2023 analysis published in Nature found that migraine, endometriosis, and anxiety disorders—all of which disproportionately affect women—received considerably less NIH funding relative to burden than conditions more prevalent in men. The gap is not explained by a lack of patients.
How does the funding gap show up in everyday diagnosis?
Endometriosis is one of the starkest examples. A review published in The Lancet noted that average waits from symptom onset to diagnosis are 7 to 9 years globally, largely because definitive diagnosis still requires surgery and noninvasive diagnostic tools haven't been developed. More than 58% of women in the UK reported making multiple visits to a care provider before any investigations were undertaken.
The reason noninvasive diagnostic tools don't exist yet is straightforward: the research to develop them hasn't been adequately funded. Conditions like endometriosis, PCOS, and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) have been under-researched for so long that basic biological mechanisms are still not fully understood. Women's pain is also more likely to be attributed to psychological causes or dismissed as normal, which delays referral and diagnosis further.
Is the research gap starting to close?
There is movement, though not at the scale needed. The NASEM report recommended that Congress appropriate $15.7 billion over five years to double NIH's investment in women's health research. A RAND Corporation analysis commissioned by Women's Health Access Matters found that even a 0.01% improvement in health outcomes from doubled funding would produce an ROI of 9,500% for coronary artery disease research in women alone. The returns on investment are enormous because the baseline investment has been so low.
Private investment in women's health has also increased in recent years, with an estimated $2.2 billion in funding directed at the sector over the last four years according to Perelel Health's analysis of NIH data. But researcher attention follows funding, and without sustained institutional commitment, progress will remain uneven and slow.
Why this matters for how DailyBasis is built.
The research gap is part of why cycle-specific nutrition barely exists as a category. Most supplement formulas were designed without accounting for how women's nutritional needs shift across the month, because that research simply hasn't been prioritized. Cycle Routine is built on the studies that do exist, in the specific forms and doses that research supports, for the specific phases of the cycle where evidence shows the need is highest.