What Qualifies as Women's Health?

Women's Health

We tend to talk about the topic a lot here at By Exxample, so we thought it would be helpful to clarify what exactly we mean by “women’s health”. In the past, women’s health has primarily referred to reproductive health and the female reproductive system. However, as the field has grown in recent years, it has become apparent that women’s health should actually encompass a much larger range of conditions.

Generally, women’s health can be split into three categories: conditions that affect women exclusively, conditions that affect women disproportionately, and conditions that affect women differently.

Exclusively

Although reproductive and gynecologic health does not fully encompass the field of women’s health, conditions that fall into these categories are of course still part of women’s health. For example, menopause, pregnancy, and ovarian cancer are conditions that only affect individuals with a female reproductive system.

Disproportionately

Source: "Why autoimmunity is most common in women."Nature. Springer Nature, 2021.

Moving beyond conditions that affect women exclusively, there are a number of health conditions that affect women disproportionately, that is, which are more common in women than in men. Some examples are autoimmune diseases (see our post here), HIV/AIDS, and chronic pain. More examples are listed in the table below. These conditions fall under the category of women’s health because (a) they affect the health of women and (b) making advancements in the management and treatment of these conditions would have a greater impact on women than on men.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA)	80% of people with RA are women
Lupus	Affects nine women for every one man
Sjogren’s syndrome (autoimmune disorder)	Affects 19 women for every one man
Alzheimer’s Disease (AD)	⅔ of people with AD are women
Lung cancer	Non-smoking women are twice as likely to get lung cancer than non-smoking men

Differently

Women with acute myocardial infarction, more commonly known as a heart attack, are more likely than men to experience adverse outcomes (aOR, or adjusted odds ratio, indicates that factors other than sex are controlled for). Source: Matetic A, et al. Trends of Sex Differences in Clinical Outcomes After Myocardial Infarction in the United States. CJC Open 3(12):2021.

Finally, some medical conditions affect both men and women but affect them differently. In these conditions, the symptoms, progression, and outcomes vary by sex, and diagnosis and treatment may require different tools and standards.

For example, although cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of death for both men and women, morphological differences in heart and vasculature structure may indicate that tools and techniques should be sex-differentiated. Perhaps because only some currently are, women tend to have worse outcomes with cardiovascular disease than men, with women being 50% more likely to die within the year following a heart attack and showing greater risk of death, stroke, and rehospitalization after coronary bypass grafting.

Summary

As the above examples demonstrate, a wide range of health conditions can be classified as women’s health due to disproportionate impacts on women compared to men. One analysis of over 350 health conditions affecting women found that only 5% were from conditions exclusive to women. Focusing the idea of women’s health too narrowly therefore inaccurately represents the field and limits investment and interest in solving these issues. Acknowledging and addressing sex-based differences in health conditions and treatments will lead to better outcomes overall and increased health for both women and men.

Sources

• “The WHAM Report: The Business Case for Accelerating Women’s Health Investment.” WHAM, 2025.

• “Women’s Health.” Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. National Institutes of Health, 2023.