Canada’s women’s health strategy ended in 1999. It shows.

None of it is surprising. It’s what happens when a country goes a quarter-century without a plan.

The last national framework expired over a decade before the smartphone era. Since then, research and healthcare delivery have evolved around male biology, while women’s health deteriorated.

Clinical research still treats men as the default. Sixty-four per cent of phase-one trials skew male, and the consequences are clear: 75 per cent of adverse drug reactions are experienced by women. 

Less than seven per cent of Canada’s health-research funding focuses on women. When a system is built without testing for half its users, inequity is the only possible outcome.

Ambien tells the story clearly. The sleep medication’s recommended dosage for women wasn’t adjusted until 2013.  Research had finally confirmed, 21 years after the drug entered the market, that women metabolize it more slowly, leading to lingering impairment the following morning. 

These are not just “women’s health issues,” they’re also dragging down our economy. Unmanaged menopause alone costs us $3.5 billion in lost productivity each year. 

Canada has more than 200 women’s-health startups. But without a national strategy their work is fragmented, and promising innovations are walled off from the emerging global market in women’s health. Closing the gender-health gap could add another $37 billion to GDP by 2040.

In the IWK Foundation’s survey of 27,000 Maritime women, nearly half said they felt uninformed about their own health. Fifteen thousand women said they worried their health concerns would be dismissed by their doctor. They’re hardly outliers.

Women’s health is still equated with reproduction, and that’s where the money flows. Meanwhile, the conditions that drive most of women’s illness and early death — heart disease, autoimmune disorders, chronic pain — are still under-studied.

Innovation capital follows what governments measure. Women’s health is barely measured at all.

A national strategy would do the one thing Canada has never done: set clear targets and make the gender-health gap measurable, and therefore solvable.

Canada is the only G7 country without a national strategy. We rank 64th in the world on women’s health. This is an unacceptable failure for a country that claims to lead.

The solutions are neither abstract nor novel.

A 10-year women’s-health investment is needed now, with a national chair appointed and measurable targets set by next year. Anything less isn’t “generational.” It’s asking another generation of women to wait their turn.

Jennifer Gillivan is President and CEO of the IWK Foundation. Her commentary draws from a recent IWK Foundation report, “The Case for Advancing Women’s Health in Canada.”