NIH grant funding in both dollars spent and projects funded has increased overall since 2013. But the portion of funding for research on women’s health has shrunk nearly every year since then, according to the report.
NIH spent 9.7 percent of its funding dollars on women’s health research in 2013 and by 2023 that spending dropped to 7.9 percent.
While women make up over half of the U.S. population, health conditions impacting mostly women have been historically under-researched and that research is typically underfunded compared to work done on conditions affecting men.
One 2021 study found that in nearly 75 percent of cases, health conditions that predominantly affect women were underfunded for the number of people they impact.
Thursday’s report comes at the request of Congress with the NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) having asked the National Academies to assess the state of women’s health research funding in the agency and to identify “critical knowledge gaps.”
One of those gaps is a lack of understanding of basic “sex-based differences in physiology,” according to the report.
The ORWH also asked the National Academies to issue a series of recommendations on how to address funding and research gaps related to women’s health. Some of those recommendations are for Congress to appropriate $11.4 billion in funding over the next five years for women’s health research and for the NIH to create a new institute dedicated solely to women’s health.
It’s unclear how Republicans will approach women’s health research next year, but some in Congress want to streamline and shrink the NIH.
Some Democratic lawmakers have expressed concern that progress made under the Biden administration will be rolled back once President-elect Trump takes office in January.
NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli said in a statement that while the report offers “thoughtful’ recommendations on how the agency can expand its research, it does not acknowledge the “full breadth” of its work on women’s health research.
“It omits the key congressional language that establishes the study of gynecological and pregnancy-related conditions at NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and it understates the significance of ongoing women’s health initiatives supported by NICHD and other NIH institutes,” she wrote.
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