by MEPs Tilly Metz, Frances Fitzgerald, Deirdre Klune, Silpa Pietikainen, Radka Maksovac and Barry Andrews
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not in any way represent the editorial position of Euronews.
As simultaneous converging crises threaten to exacerbate inequalities and draw increased attention to the need to address women’s unmet health needs, the EU must step up its efforts to support research and development in women’s health globally, six MEPs wrote.
advertisementWomen bear the brunt of the health crisis. COVID-19 has laid bare the stark inequalities they face.
Personal protective equipment (PPE) is designed for men’s anatomy and therefore does not fit women’s anatomy properly (even though more than 70% of the world’s health care workers are women).
Pregnant women were not included in the vaccine trials, which led to increased vaccine hesitancy, a worrying finding. Lockdowns have increased the risk of gender-based violence, as also highlighted in a lessons learned report submitted by the European Parliament’s Special Committee on COVID-19 in 2023.
As members of the European Parliament’s newly established Interest Group on Women’s Health, it is a key challenge for us that the diversity of women’s health needs continues to be ignored.
This exclusion extends to the earliest stages of research, with differences between male and female sex cells rarely being used or reported in biomedical research experiments.
This “ignorance” about sex and gender continues throughout the research and development (R&D) pipeline, resulting in the development of medical technologies that are not necessarily effective or safe for women, who are twice as likely to experience adverse drug reactions as men.
Growing threats, asymmetric risks
As the world faces increasingly increasingly complex health threats, women face greater risks. Biological factors and gender norms lead to disparities in disease severity and socio-economic impacts. In its recently updated Global Health Strategy, the EU “prioritized tackling the root causes of disease, paying particular attention to the rights of women and girls, vulnerable and disadvantaged groups.”
This must underpin the Strategy’s commitment to “ensure that innovative vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics against new, widespread or neglected infectious and non-communicable diseases are developed and put into use, including with funding from Horizon Europe”.
The EU should provide dedicated funding to specifically address remaining knowledge and product gaps for women and girls, including supporting interdisciplinary research projects that address the complex interplay between health, gender and the environment.
Women in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are particularly vulnerable to infectious diseases because geographic, socio-economic and political factors increase their risk of infection and limit their access to prevention and treatment.
Adolescent girls and young women in sub-Saharan Africa are more than three times more likely to be infected with HIV than their male counterparts, and they also suffer from higher rates of malaria, which can cause serious complications during pregnancy, with an estimated 819,000 low-birth-weight babies in the region in 2020.
Infectious diseases are deeply intertwined with women’s sexual and reproductive health, and climate change threatens to exacerbate the severity of these shared challenges, from the spread of vector-borne diseases such as dengue fever as a result of climate change, to disruptions to access to sexual and reproductive health services as a result of extreme weather events.
Balancing the global research agenda
A more equitable allocation of research funding that better reflects the disease burden and unmet needs of women would take into account gender-related barriers, vulnerabilities and opportunities and help better prioritize R&D investments in areas where women are most in need of support.
The EU’s strong international cooperation on R&I provides ample opportunities to work with international organisations, research institutes, the private sector, representatives of civil society and, importantly, affected communities to realise progress on this agenda.
Analysis of research trends shows that funding for diseases that disproportionately affect women, such as endometriosis, gynecological cancers, migraines and anxiety disorders, is not commensurate with the disease burden.
This disparity is even more pronounced in a context that continues to disproportionately affect women in developing countries.
Recent publications highlight that research funding for maternal health conditions such as preeclampsia/eclampsia and postpartum haemorrhage accounted for less than 1% of sexual and reproductive health research and development funding in Europe between 2018 and 2020.
Untapped potential to address unmet needs
Making sex and gender consideration a requirement to receive research funding from Horizon Europe, the EU’s flagship research framework programme, clearly signals the EU’s significant commitment to promoting gender equality in research and development.
advertisementIt is important that the successor, FP10, strengthens these efforts, placing greater emphasis on intersectional considerations (such as the intersection of gender with age, race, and socioeconomic status) and more rigorously exploring women’s unmet health needs through dedicated funding.
Europe receives just 13% of global funding for sexual and reproductive health research and development, with investments split evenly between public and private organizations. More of the EU’s health and research budget needs to be allocated to women’s health – to better understand and intervene in conditions that are specific to women, as well as conditions that affect women disproportionately, differently or uniquely.
Innovative financing models should also be considered to better align public and private investments to deliver innovations that will best contribute to improving women’s health.
In 2024, it is no longer acceptable that women routinely experience the direct impacts of gender inequality in health care, barriers and delays in accessing preventive services and medical care, being ignored by medical professionals, and receiving inaccurate diagnoses and suboptimal treatment.
From medical education that challenges deep-rooted biases, to including sex and gender in research, to improving pharmacovigilance activities, we must accelerate efforts to reverse these inequities.
advertisementAs converging crises threaten to exacerbate inequalities and draw attention to the need to address women’s unmet health needs, the EU must step up its efforts to support research and development in women’s health globally.
Such investments will lead to improved health outcomes for women and contribute to improved social well-being, benefiting us all.
Tilly Metz (Green Party/European Liberal Association, Luxembourg), Frances FitzGerald (European People’s Party, Ireland), Deirdre Klune (European People’s Party, Ireland), Silpa Pietikainen (European People’s Party, Finland), Radka Maxová (Social Democrats, Czech Republic) and Barry Andrews (Renew, Ireland) are members of the European Parliament.
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