“The story of women’s struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights.” – Gloria Steinem.
Healthcare gender gap
The United Nations has declared the theme for this year’s International Women’s Day 2025 as “Accelerate Action”, calling for swift action to achieve gender equality. This message rings the alarm on the slow progress being made toward this goal, as at the current rate, it will take until 2158—or approximately five generations—to reach gender parity.
The healthcare gender gap looms large. While women on average enjoy a longer life—with an additional 7 years of life expectancy compared to men—they disproportionately spend their last decade with disease, disability, and dementia, accounting for over 75% of all cases. The female longevity advantage is lost due to the time women spend in poor physical and cognitive health. This means that female lifespan advantages are not currently matched by a longer healthspan.
FemSpan: Dr. Jennifer Pearlman
The concept of FemSpan, coined by Dr. Pearlman, aims to apply a female-centric approach to healthy aging and disease management to ensure that women are maximally able to benefit from their female longevity advantage with healthy aging.
To this end, change is needed across the biomedical sphere—from research to disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. Identifying and addressing the unique disease risk factors that exist for women, especially those related to hormonal events, pregnancy complications, and menopause, will play an important role in solving the gender gap in healthcare outcomes.
Beyond the healthcare gender gap, Dr. Pearlman calls for accelerating action to close the healthcare innovation gap that currently leaves women and female health priorities underrepresented in early-stage research. “Women,” she states, “are not mini-men,” and the practice of systematically excluding women—and even female animal subjects—from early-stage research results in gender biases that too often manifest downstream as healthcare disparities for women.
Optimizing Female Longevity
When it comes to aging research and the development of “geroprotective” therapies, few have been studied in females. The concept of delaying or even preventing menopause remains obscure in healthcare despite clear evidence suggesting that the later a woman’s natural menopause, the longer she will live. Women who reach menopause after the age of 53 years—compared to those who experience early menopause before the age of 45—will live on average 7 years longer. With the substantial health consequences of early menopause, it would be advantageous to identify women at risk of premature reproductive aging and provide ovarian rescue therapy to defer menopause.
The Grandmother theory
Notably, over the past 150 years, there has been a doubling of life expectancy. However, reproductive life expectancy has not changed. Human females are one of only two species to outlive their menopause (the other being toothed whales), giving rise to the grandmother theory of menopause, which posits that Grandmothering became so evolutionarily valuable to the species that human women developed metabolic adaptations to allow them to live beyond the natural cessation of their reproductive life.
The metabolic adaptation allowing for this is the ability of peripheral adipose tissue to take over where the ovaries left off after menopause. For postmenopausal women, the production of estrogen from androgens in fat tissues provides much of the systemic effects that ovarian estrogen once yielded prior to the cessation of ovulation. But the metabolic and body composition changes that occur after menopause come with a health expense for women, who assume increased risks of chronic diseases of aging, including heart disease, diabetes, stroke, dementia, and osteoporosis.
Financial burden of menopause
Menopause remains a costly enterprise, both in terms of these health consequences and the financial impact. A woman will age three-fold faster in the decade surrounding her menopause than at any other time. The vast majority of Western women experience disruptive symptoms of menopause, including hot flashes, night sweats, sleep and mood disturbance, brain fog, aches and pains, sexual dysfunction, vaginal dryness, and bladder infections. More than half of menopausal women with symptoms report being debilitated by their symptoms and experiencing a loss of productivity.
The financial burden of menopause in healthcare is thought to cost the Canadian economy over $3.5 billion annually due to lost productivity, lost income, and missed work. In Canada, it is estimated that over 540,000 workdays are lost annually to menopausal symptoms. At a global level, the estimated financial cost of the gender health gap, if not resolved, will be over $1 trillion by 2040.
Solving the gender healthcare gap and optimizing female longevity are actionable goals. We can harness the expansive science of epigenetics to identify the approximately 70% of our genome that shows sex-specific expression and confers gender-based susceptibilities in disease risk, metabolism, and aging. Developing strategies to delay and possibly defer menopause promises to preserve fertility, extend reproductive lifespan, and confer a longer healthspan for women.
Gender-specific preventative health strategies
Lifestyle factors and environmental exposures affect the health of women differently than men. Heart disease is a case in point. The traditional risks, such as high cholesterol and blood pressure, are more specific to men. However, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, smoking, hormonal status, and stress increase risk to a greater extent in women than in men. Accounting for the differentiated expression of the genome between the sexes will be necessary for the development of gender-specific preventative health strategies.
The lights are on at last in the area of women’s health. The revelation of gender gaps and healthcare disparities is paving the way for female-focused solutions. As menopause has its moment, and misconceptions and long-held dogma are replaced by a deeper understanding of gender-based biology, we are enabling a women’s health renaissance that can unlock FemSpan.
Dr. Jennifer Pearlman
This article was written by Dr. Jennifer Pearlman, an internationally renowned medical expert, health entrepreneur, and visionary. She is a board-certified medical doctor and expert in women’s health, menopause, and longevity medicine. She is the Medical Director and Founder of PearlMD Rejuvenation in Toronto, Canada, and licensed in Florida and New York, practicing with a global platform. She is Co-founder of HealthSpan Digital and Advisor at AI Nexus Healthcare. Dr. Pearlman is the Director of Women’s Health and Faculty at The Geneva College of Longevity Science (GCLS) and on the Board of Directors of the Global Longevity Summit.
Experience FemSpan Firsthand: A Masterclass in Female Longevity
Don’t miss Dr. Jennifer Pearlman at the A4M Spring Congress 2025!
Living Longer, Living Better: The Promise of Longevity Medicine
The healthcare gender gap requires urgent attention and swift action. As demand for specialized women’s health practices grows, ensure you’re positioned to face it head-on with innovative, thoughtful, and sex-specific interventions. Join Dr. Pearlman at the 2025 A4M Spring Congress on Saturday, April 26th, at 1:00 PM for her pivotal presentation “FemSpan: A Female-Centric Approach To Extend Healthspan” as part of the “Aging, Amplified: Innovations in Women’s Wellness” session. Click here to learn more and reserve your seat today!
As with anything you read on the internet, this article should not be construed as medical advice; please talk to your doctor or primary care provider before changing your wellness routine. WHN does not agree or disagree with any of the materials posted. This article is not intended to provide a medical diagnosis, recommendation, treatment, or endorsement. Additionally, it is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.
Content may be edited for style and length.
References/Sources/Materials provided by:
