Each May, the US celebration of Mother’s Day marks the beginning of National Women’s Health Week. Led by the US Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office on Women’s Health, this annual campaign calls attention to women’s health issues and offers information and resources to promote mental, physical, and emotional wellness among women. This week came out of the existing health gender gap, a gap that could be narrowed in part by promoting education among girls and women and addressing the AI gender gap.
Please note: For the purpose of this blog, “gender” refers to an individual’s self-identification and experience in a social and cultural context.
Measuring Gender Disparities in Health Outcomes
While women’s life expectancies are longer than their male counterparts’, research indicates that they spend 25% more of their lives in poor health. According to a recently published study, women bear more disease burden than men for conditions such as lower back pain, depression, and headache disorders. Additional findings indicate that women experience more adverse events from medications as compared to men and suffer worse outcomes from some conditions that men and women share, such as asthma and cardiovascular disease. These disparities may be due in part to misdiagnosis and delayed diagnosis, which, evidence suggests, women experience at a higher rate than men.
How Education Can Improve Women’s Health
Education universally supports better health outcomes. The World Health Organization (WHO) ranks education among the social determinants of health (SDH) and notes that, according to some studies, 30-55% of health outcomes are attributable to SDHs.
These benefits can be especially impactful for women. Education strengthens life competencies that lead to resilience in the face of life’s challenges and control over environmental factors and other conditions that impact health. Because women are relatively disadvantaged according to other social attributes that drive health, these tools are more powerful differentiators in the lives of women, and one study found that education has a greater impact on women’s self-rated health than on men’s self-rated health.
When mothers in particular are educated, the benefits extend throughout families and communities. A UN report states that, with each additional year of a mother’s education, the probability of infant mortality is reduced by 5-10%. In addition, studies show that the education of mothers has a significant impact on intergenerational mobility.
Boosting Workforce Representation to Bridge the Health Gap
Education can also play a role in boosting women’s workforce participation, a driver of positive SDHs such as socioeconomic security and empowerment. A recent report by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in collaboration with the McKinsey Health Institute estimates that closing the gender health gap could add seven healthy years each year to the lives of 3.9 billion women and could potentially add $1 trillion to the global economy by 2040.
While increasing women’s participation across all segments of the workforce promises to improve the lives of women, families, and communities, greater representation of women in certain fields can directly address the gender divide in healthcare. Many of the conditions that widen the gender health gap underscore historical biases that have been enshrined in such manifestations as data gaps and a legacy of treatment approaches that fail to account for health differences across the gender spectrum. For example, women weren’t included in clinical studies until the late 1980s, and their inclusion wasn’t mandated in the US until 1993. Worldwide, only 1% of healthcare research and development is invested in women’s health, and one study found that only one quarter of clinical trials in the US had sex-disaggregated data.
Empowering women to tackle the barriers that stand between them and better health can make a significant difference in all of these areas. From clinical trial design to healthcare leadership, roles in which women are underrepresented are instrumental in bridging the gender gap in health. And AI is rapidly emerging among the fields that can have a positive impact, negatively or positively, on women’s health.
AI and the Gender Health Gap
AI has the potential to help correct the gender imbalance in healthcare. Through tailored AI business solutions, it can provide powerful tools for bias testing and the development of personalized care. It’s also possible that AI can augment the insufficient supply of research data collected from and about women by generating synthetic data. AI integration services are also driving innovations in women’s health, such as algorithms that read mammograms with high accuracy and solutions that detect postpartum hypertension and diabetes.
But as the role of AI applications in health continues to grow, the enduring biases reflected in data—or absence of data—can become amplified. Even well-intended AI business solutions can perpetuate disparities if they’re built on biased datasets. For instance, a diagnostic tool was found to be 50% more likely to misdiagnose women than men, and a model designed to predict liver disease missed 44% of cases in women compared to only 23% in men. This underscores the importance of designing AI integration services with equity and inclusion at the core, especially in healthcare.
Increasing the representation of women in AI is essential to achieving more equitable outcomes. A more diverse workforce helps ensure that AI business solutions and AI integration services reflect a broader range of experiences and needs. Yet, according to a 2020 WEF report, women account for only 26% of AI and data professionals—a clear indicator of the work still ahead.
Empowering Women to Promote Women’s Health
A history of circumstances has proven less than favorable to women’s health. But with each step toward greater awareness of these issues, we gain insights into how we can change these circumstances. Empowering women to shape research, care, and technology will help us turn these insights into solutions. We hope that every National Women’s Health Week in years to come will be a celebration of progress in women’s health.
Q&A: Understanding the Link Between AI, Education, and the Gender Health Gap
The gender health gap refers to disparities in health outcomes between women and men. Although women tend to live longer, they often spend more years in poor health and face higher rates of misdiagnosis and adverse medication effects. Addressing this gap is critical to achieving equitable healthcare outcomes.
