International Women's Day: Technology, Data, and the Gender Health Gap

International Women's Day tends to generate lots of conversations about leadership pipelines, pay, representation, and visibility.

These are legitimate concerns.

Yet one of the most consequential gender equity challenges sits in the data, technologies, and systems shaping the future of healthcare.

Digital health tools, artificial intelligence, remote monitoring, and personalised medicine are transforming how care is delivered and experienced. These technologies promise more precise diagnosis, more personalised treatment, and greater access to care. But their effectiveness depends fundamentally on the quality of the data and research that underpin them.

For much of modern medical history, those foundations have been incomplete when it comes to women. Gender disparities have shaped medicine for decades. Understanding this tension is essential if digital health is to deliver on its promise of more equitable care.

If we build digital health on inequitable foundations, we will not close the gender health gap. We will automate it.

The gender health gap is structural, longstanding, and poorly understood outside specialist circles. Women live longer than men but spend a greater proportion of their lives in poor health. Women experience approximately 25% more years in poor health than men across comparable populations [1].

The World Economic Forum (WEF) and McKinsey Health Institute estimate that closing the gap globally could generate $1 trillion annually in economic value, through better health outcomes and improved workforce participation [1].

The roots of today's gender health gap lie partly in the history of biomedical research. For decades, women were routinely excluded from clinical trials. Concerns about pregnancy risks and hormonal variation led many researchers to favour male participants, particularly in early drug trials. The consequence was a medical knowledge base built predominantly around male physiology. The National Institutes of Health only introduced a formal policy requiring sex as a biological variable in research in 2016 [2]; the EU followed. Decades of incomplete evidence preceded these corrections.

Women with endometriosis wait, on average, eight years for a diagnosis in the UK [3].

Heart attacks in women are still more frequently missed or misattributed than in men, partly because the diagnostic criteria were developed using male-dominated research populations [4].

A major analysis published in The BMJ found that women remain under-represented in clinical trials across several therapeutic areas, including cardiovascular disease, despite the fact that these conditions affect both sexes [5].

Autoimmune conditions, which disproportionately affect women, remain chronically underfunded and poorly understood. These are examples of systemic diagnostic failure at scale.

Another challenge lies in the design of digital health technologies themselves. Many health technologies, including wearable devices and biometric sensors, have historically been developed using datasets that over-represent male physiology. This can introduce bias into algorithms that interpret physiological signals such as heart rate variability, sleep patterns, or activity levels.

Research published in Springer Nature npj Digital Medicine highlights how wearable technologies may produce different levels of accuracy across demographic groups depending on how training datasets were constructed [7].

For women, physiological processes such as menstrual cycles, pregnancy, and menopause introduce biological variations that many digital health tools were not originally designed to capture. Technologies built on incomplete datasets and calibrated against male norms will produce less useful and potentially misleading outputs for women.

This matters because digital health technologies increasingly influence clinical decision-making. Algorithms trained on incomplete datasets can embed bias into predictive models, risk scores, and treatment recommendations. At population scale, this translates into unequal clinical benefit — the populations that most need better diagnostic tools receiving systematically less value from them.

Women interact with healthcare systems more frequently than men. They are more likely to seek healthcare services, manage family health needs, and engage with preventive care. These patterns extend into digital health. Women are major users of certain digital health tools, particularly those related to reproductive health, mental health, and caregiving.

Caregiving roles also shape women's digital health engagement. Women are more likely to coordinate healthcare for children, older relatives, or family members with chronic conditions. Digital technologies therefore become tools not only for personal health management but also for navigating complex care systems.

Yet these responsibilities can also create constraints. Time pressures, digital literacy challenges, and unequal access to devices can limit adoption. Women are also more likely than men to experience digital exclusion, particularly older women and those in lower-income groups, due to device access, digital literacy, and cost. Most national digital health strategies do not address this adequately [6].

This matters because digital health is increasingly positioned as a primary access route: for appointments, monitoring, test results, referrals, and self-management. Where access to that infrastructure is unequal, the health system's digital transformation will deliver unequal outcomes.

Innovation in healthcare is strongly influenced by where capital flows. Despite growing demand for women's health technologies, investment in the FemTech sector remains relatively limited compared with its potential impact. Analyses of venture capital investment show that women's health technologies have historically received a small share of digital health investment relative to the size of the market opportunity.

Research by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) highlights the rapid growth of FemTech but also notes persistent investment disparities that affect the scale and pace of innovation in women's health [8].

These funding patterns shape the healthcare technologies that reach the market. Conditions affecting women may receive less attention from researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors when investment ecosystems undervalue the sector. Addressing this imbalance is not simply a matter of fairness. It also represents a significant opportunity for health innovation and economic growth.

Despite these challenges, digital health technologies also offer powerful opportunities to improve women's health outcomes — expanding access to reproductive and maternal care, enabling remote monitoring of chronic conditions, supporting self-management, and connecting underserved populations to services.

A systematic review published in The Lancet Group Digital Health found that digital health interventions can improve access to healthcare, enhance health education, and support self-management among women, particularly in low-resource settings [9].

Realising these benefits requires intentional design and action in the following areas:

• Gender-inclusive research mandates
• Privacy protections calibrated to the sensitivity of reproductive and women's health data
• Inclusive research practices and representative datasets
• Ethical governance of sensitive health data
• Investment in women's health innovation that reflects the actual burden of disease in female populations
• Policies that address digital access and literacy

These priorities align closely with broader efforts to build health systems that are more inclusive, data-driven, and responsive to population needs.

The gender health gap in digital health is a governance issue as much as a clinical one. Closing it requires rethinking how health technology is designed, evaluated, funded, and governed.

Action is needed across procurement decisions, data standards, equity requirements in technology funding, design, evaluation, and investment in digital inclusion — to determine whether innovation leads to more inclusive care, or whether these technologies will reinforce existing inequities.

International Women's Day offers an opportunity to reflect on that challenge.