What Happens When You Treat Women's Health as Infrastructure?
The economic question most health systems haven't asked yet.
What does it actually cost when a health system wasn’t designed for half the population, and what would it take to redesign it?
That’s the question at the center of a convening taking place in New York, at Cure, during CSW on March 10th.
On March 10th, the Consulate General of Switzerland is hosting The Architecture of Women’s Health, a dialogue on health economics, AI, and insurance infrastructure during the 70th Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women.
Federal Councillor Elisabeth Baume-Schneider, who leads Switzerland’s Federal Department of Home Affairs, will participate alongside senior leaders from government, health systems, life sciences, and technology.
FemTechnology is proud to be co-convening this conversation.
Why this conversation, and why now?
Even the most sophisticated health systems in the world, show a consistent pattern: the system spends significantly more to achieve worse outcomes for women compared to men. Not because women’s care is inherently more expensive, but because the infrastructure, from clinical guidelines to diagnostic algorithms to insurance architecture, was built on evidence that systematically underrepresented female physiology.
This isn’t any one country’s problem. It’s a structural one. And it’s one that can be examined as an engineering problem, not only an equity argument.
The question for March 10th isn’t “does the gap exist?” — the evidence on that is overwhelming. The question is: what would the redesigned infrastructure actually look like, who needs to be involved, and what’s the economic case for building it?
The data underneath
For those who want to go deeper before (or instead of) being in the room, here’s where the evidence stands:
The cost asymmetry is real and compounding. Women in the U.S. face a health expenditure gap of roughly 6.8% vs. 3.9% of income compared to men, a differential that compounds across a career into a six-figure lifetime disadvantage. This isn’t driven by utilization alone. It’s driven by misdiagnosis, delayed diagnosis, treatments calibrated on male physiology, and a clinical evidence base where only 3.6% of FDA-approved drug labels include sex-stratified safety data.
AI is accelerating the problem, not fixing it. As health systems integrate AI-driven clinical decision support, the models inherit the same biases present in the training data. When the ground truth in medicine was built on a male default, the algorithms reproduce that default at scale, faster, and with the veneer of objectivity. (We published on this in Nature Reviews Bioengineering and in our recent report, Invisible by Design.)
The employer burden is measurable. In our survey of 1,000+ women across 42 countries (in collaboration with the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association), 70% reported losing 1-5 days of productivity per month due to women’s health issues. Only about 1 in 10 felt adequately supported by their employer. This isn’t wellness programming territory, it’s workforce economics. (Full report here.)
Longevity science has a blind spot. Women live longer but spend roughly 25% more of those years in poor health. Yet in pharmacological lifespan studies, 40% used only males or didn’t report sex. The field designed to extend healthspan is largely ignoring the biology of the people who live longest. (Our longevity report.)
What comes out of the room
The March 10th convening brings together approximately 40-50 senior leaders from insurance, reinsurance, AI, health systems, government, and finance.
But the output won’t stay in the room. We’ll be publishing key frameworks, findings, and strategic directions that emerge from the conversation, so if you’re working in these spaces and want to engage with the thinking, subscribe and you’ll receive it.
If you or someone you know is a stakeholder in reinsurance, insurance health AI, or health economics, please feel free to forward this message. If you’d like to explore a potential fit for our March 10th event, reach out to oriana@femtechnology.org to see if there is alignment.
This event is graciously hosted by Cure.
This is part of a larger body of work FemTechnology has been building over the past years. If you’re new here, the research library lives at femtechnology.org, and these are the pieces most relevant to the March 10th conversation:
The Gender Health Tax at Work — workplace economics
Invisible by Design — AI bias in women’s health
The Missing Half of Longevity Science — longevity
Health Copilots Are Here. The Data Isn’t Ready. — AI clinical infrastructure