These trends point to the emergence of a broader, more durable investment base. With stronger data, faster R&D and wider participation, this momentum could progress into sustained capital flows powering a high-growth market. Why underfinancing persists Key barriers include: –Limited foundational science: Until 1993, US clinical trials did not require the inclusion of women, skewing evidence towards male physiology. Many large studies still fail to report sex-disaggregated outcomes.28 –Reimbursement gaps: Coverage for women’s health is inconsistent and often limited to narrow benefits, leaving many treatments and preventive services uncovered.29 –Fragmented financing: Women’s health has no clear “home” in mainstream capital markets. Funding is dispersed across public budgets, philanthropy and small impact funds, leaving no centre of gravity to aggregate at scale. –Measurement gaps: Inconsistent data on prevalence, outcomes, capital flows and return on investment (ROI) make market sizing difficult. –Regulatory friction: Standards based on male physiology, combined with exclusion of pregnant and lactating women from trials, extend timelines and increase risk.30 Many women’s health areas also lack validated surrogate end-points (e.g. endometriosis),31 while others overlook outcomes most meaningful to women, such as pain, function and quality of life.32 –Pipeline bottlenecks: Despite rising interest, 70–80% of women’s health deals are early-stage, vs. two-thirds in broader healthcare,33 leaving few scaled assets to attract institutional investors. In the US, cuts to the Women’s Health Initiative34 and constrained federal innovation funding, including the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant programme,35 have compounded these pressures. In the United Kingdom, the withdrawal of national funding incentives for women’s health hubs36 had a similar effect, perpetuating the cycle of underfinancing despite clear demand. The Women’s Health Investment Index To provide greater transparency into global investments in women’s health, this report introduces the Women’s Health Investment Index – a comprehensive tool that tracks private-sector capital flows – across therapeutic areas, industry areas and type of investment. Inspired by the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI)’s Global Landscape of Climate Finance report, the index is designed to clarify a fragmented, opaque investment landscape. Before the CPI’s climate mapping, climate finance also suffered from fragmented data, unclear value pathways and perceived risk. Once transparent data emerged, climate investments nearly doubled.37 The goal here is to enable a similar acceleration in women’s health. By offering standardized, data-driven insights, the index reduces the information barriers that have long hindered capital flows into women’s health. It captures the current state of the women’s health market relative to the broader healthcare landscape, highlighting where capital is concentrated, where white space remains, and which areas show favourable conditions for investment. The index can help investors identify underserved markets with strong growth potential, pinpoint saturated spaces where new technologies could gain an edge and evaluate the commercial outlook of emerging segments. Ultimately, the index provides a shared evidence base to understand the women’s health investment landscape, including its bottlenecks and exemplar areas where growth and investment potential are strong. It supports evidence-informed decision- making for investors, with the aim of directing greater financial backing towards women’s health R&D and enterprises, scaling innovation and improving health outcomes for women. Women’s Health Investment Outlook 7

Womens Health Investment Outlook 2026