Why women's health needs to be studied beyond reproductive issues

Early in her career, Lisa Marceau identified a striking contradiction.

While working at New England Research Institutes, first as a researcher and program manager and then as an executive, she was quick to notice gender differences in how diseases presented themselves, how they were diagnosed and how they were treated.

“Women are treated very much differently across diseases,” says Marceau, who founded Alpha Millennial Health and digital health company Joyuus in 2022. “It’s not that women have more disease. It’s that we’re not treated early enough.

Formidable yesterday delved into the untapped market opportunity for women’s health, a market that’s been called a $1 trillion opportunity by 2030. Today we’re talking with Marceau, who lives in Los Angeles, on her work reforming the health care system to better reflect the unique conditions and misunderstandings that affect women.

Edited for length and clarity.

Is the environment around women’s health changing? It has. About a decade ago, women’s health became part of the map, but mostly around reproductive services. The challenge right now is we need to evolve, because we’re spending a lot of time in that lifespan, which is 44% for women, and 56% is on the other side of that. That’s where we need to focus.

What’s it going to take to move the needle? There are starting to be conversations around the differentiated market, which is really the conversation we need to be having, because the market and funding are staying in this reproductive space. We have built an entire system on a male model, but women’s health is a second market. We shouldn’t be talking about a gap, but an entirely different health market.

What are some examples? Take cardiovascular disease. Take Alzheimer’s and dementia. Take autoimmune disorders. When we look at these as a completely different market, it starts to give us data that’s looking at diseases across the lifespan very differently. 

Are economics driving that change? I spend a lot of time in that space. What drives investment? What we are tending to do right now is define that in the reproductive space. What we need to do, as innovators, as entrepreneurs, as investors, is start looking outside of that from a female lens. That’s what makes it clear what that market incentive is, and that’s what’s going to drive change.

Is there a particularly acute story that illustrates that? There’s one research example that really defines this important topic. Prostate cancer and ovarian cancer are both hormonally-based conditions. They’re both very asymptomatic early on and they’re really hard to identify. Men typically die with prostate cancer, not of it. Women die from ovarian cancer. The big difference is prostate cancer is consistently a top funding priority and ovarian cancer isn’t. We know that if we don’t study it, we don’t identify it.

How optimistic are you about the future of women’s health care? The goal is to really demonstrate that we need to be looking across all the chronic conditions across life and create a data model that complement the model we already have. When we combine those, we’re not just talking about women’s health. We actually start solving for health across gender. Again, cardiovascular disease creates such an interesting set of examples.