President Biden establishes White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research to research understudied female health issues by bringing together engineers and scientists to develop innovative solutions

President Biden has issued an executive order to establish the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, with the goal of addressing imbalances that women face in health research, treatment, data collection, and funding for issues such as menopause. This adds to prior Biden administration actions to address issues such as maternity-related depression and mortality.

After the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) was established in 1990, America has focused on treating women’s health issues. $4.6 billion was spent on NIH women's health research in FY2022, and progress to included outcomes by sex in NIH-funded trials is positive (13% of studies in 2004 to 43% of studies in 2021).

Nevertheless, the percentage of NIH-funded trials measuring the outcomes on women is not 100%, so the initiative calls for an additional $12 billion for women’s research and small businesses innovations to address this. Women are still understudied in many areas such as chronic fatigue syndrome, endrometriosis, and anxiety disorders, although they are overrepresented in a few such as musculoskeletal disease.

The order expands the focus across multiple government agencies including the HHS, OMB, OSTP, EPA, FDA, and even DoD. These agencies will collectively focus on women’s health by collaborating with the public by bringing together engineers, scientists, and others to create innovative solutions through research, technology transfers, conferences, and more. Specifically, the HHS will research menopause-related issues, and the NIH will research biomarkers to help create treatments for issues such as endometriosis.

Within the tech field, the initiative instructs the HHS and NSF to study how AI can be used to improve women’s health research, and the NIH to identify ways for researchers and medical professionals to easily collect, analyze, and report women’s health data.

While there’s much more in the Executive Order, two curiosities stand out. First, the DoD is ordered to spend $10 million (if available despite a budget of over $800 billion) on cancer and mental health of women in the military without directly addressing the exposure of troops to cancer-causing substances in tanks and nuclear missile control rooms or assaults. Second, the LGBTQ+ were ignored by the director of the White House Gender Policy Council in her answer to whether they are included in the initiative.

Readers who are AI programmers, data specialists, or researchers should start reading about how to write a successful grant to help solve women’s health issues.