Women make up over half of the U.S. population, yet research on women’s health conditions, including those that are female specific such as fibroids, more common among women such as anxiety, or affect women differently such cardiovascular disease, is severely lacking. Medical advances for women have lagged, in part due to a lack of understanding of basic sex-based differences in physiology. To address this, the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Office of Research in Women’s Health tasked the National Academies with convening a committee of experts to assess the state of women’s health research at NIH, identify critical knowledge gaps, assess the level of funding for women’s health research, and more.
