How medicine forgot women and why Asia cannot afford to make the same mistake

Women’s health has long been treated as a specialised category - its own clinics, its own awareness months, its own funding silo. That framing is problematic because women’s health is a missing layer of healthcare infrastructure, not a niche. Until it is designed into the foundations of how we build, fund, and deliver care (that is data systems, diagnostic algorithms, clinical pathways, and delivery networks), this gap will not close.
We had the internet before we had a law requiring that women be included in medical research. The NIH did not mandate inclusion of women in clinical trials until 1993. For two decades before that, drug pharmacology was built almost entirely on male biology and prescribed to women on the assumption it would work the same way. Except it did not. Women experience adverse drug reactions nearly twice as often as men. Women under 55 presenting with heart attack symptoms are seven times more likely to be sent home undiagnosed - because the classic presentation was derived from male patient data, and female symptoms like nausea and jaw pain are still routinely attributed to anxiety.

The HRT episode shows what happens when flawed science goes unchallenged for a generation. A 2002 US study linked hormone therapy to elevated breast cancer risk; HRT use collapsed, and physicians stopped prescribing it. The study had enrolled women averaging 63 years old (twelve years past menopause onset), and the headline finding was statistically non-significant in the original data. In November 2025, twenty-three years later, the FDA removed those black box warnings. Today, 1B+ women are at or approaching menopause globally, and the cost of that two-decade error is incalculable.

Investing and operating across India, America, and Southeast Asia, we have seen firsthand that the women’s health gap is not an abstraction. It shows up in diagnostic queues, in primary care conversations, and in the conditions that arrive late because nothing in the system was designed to catch them early.
India’s numbers are stark. Over 50% of Indian women of reproductive age are anaemic, a figure that has barely moved in two decades despite being a stated policy priority. PCOS affects an estimated 9 to 36% of Indian women depending on diagnostic criteria, a range that itself reflects how poorly understood and inconsistently diagnosed the condition remains. Endometriosis, which affects roughly one in ten women globally, takes an average of 7 to 10 years to diagnose even in well-resourced settings; in India, where gynaecological engagement carries cultural stigma and specialist access outside cities is limited, that gap is almost certainly longer. The maternal mortality ratio varies by a factor of nearly two between Indian states, meaning the outcome of a pregnancy is still largely determined by geography.

PCOS and endometriosis are worth dwelling on precisely because they are not rare. Together, they affect hundreds of millions of women globally and a disproportionate share in South Asia. Both are systematically underdiagnosed. Both carry long-term consequences (metabolic, cardiovascular, reproductive) that compound the longer the diagnosis is delayed. Both are conditions where earlier identification, through better-designed diagnostics and more alert primary care, would change outcomes measurably.

Across Southeast Asia, this pattern holds as well. Cervical cancer, almost entirely preventable, remains a leading cause of cancer death among women in Indonesia and Vietnam because screening infrastructure has not reached scale.

Asia is a live experiment. The continent is building healthcare infrastructure at a pace and scale that has no historical precedent. The question is whether women are being designed into that infrastructure from the start or whether the gender-blind defaults of Western medicine are being encoded into the foundations before anyone notices.

Asia’s healthcare market will reach 5T+ dollars by 2030. Hospital networks, diagnostic chains, digital platforms, and primary care systems are being built simultaneously. The design choices being made now (what data gets collected, which symptoms get flagged, whose clinical presentation is treated as the norm) will determine outcomes for generations. This is the moment. It will not repeat itself.

The real opportunity in women’s health is infrastructure: diagnostics that reach Tier II and III cities, AI models trained on sex-disaggregated data, clinical pathways designed around female symptom presentations, and supply chains that make essential products accessible and affordable beyond urban centres. An AI diagnostic trained on male-biased datasets will reproduce the cardiovascular misdiagnosis problem at algorithmic scale. Getting the data layer right is the prerequisite for everything built on top of it.

There is a useful precedent in design history. Curb cuts were built for wheelchair users. They turned out to benefit cyclists, delivery workers, and parents with strollers. Designing for the excluded population improved the system for everyone. The same principle applies here: Diagnostic algorithms calibrated to female symptom presentations will catch more disease across all patients. Dosing protocols adjusted by sex will reduce adverse reactions across populations. Clinical pathways designed for women who face access barriers will extend care to every underserved group. This is not a special interest. It is rational system design.

Some of this is already being built. Telemedicine platforms are extending specialist-equivalent consultations into districts where no specialist practices. Distribution networks are making hygiene and maternal health products available at the scale India requires. Early-stage diagnostic tools are beginning to apply AI to conditions like PCOS and endometriosis that have historically been caught late or missed entirely. These are not FemTech plays but rather healthcare infrastructure investments whose returns compound precisely because they are filling a structural gap rather than serving an incremental need.

The case for action here is not primarily moral, though it is that too. It is structural. Half the population carries a disproportionate burden of unaddressed health need. The infrastructure to address it is being built right now. The question is not whether Asian healthcare will expand - it will. The question is whether that expansion will be designed with women in mind across data, diagnosis, delivery, and capital, or whether it will replicate the defaults that Western medicine spent decades trying to correct.

The goal is not to include women in systems built without them. It is to redesign the systems - data collection that is sex-disaggregated from the point of entry, diagnostic protocols that reflect female presentation, delivery models that reach women where they are, and capital allocation that reflects the actual scale of the opportunity. McKinsey estimates closing the gap could add one trillion dollars annually to the global economy by 2040. That is not a philanthropic number. It is a market sizing.

The window to build this correctly is open. It will not stay open indefinitely.

Catch all LIVE updates on the US-Iran conflict here.