Gender Disparities in Healthcare: A Look at Equity and How Technology Can Help
In this blog
Equitable healthcare remains one of the most persistent challenges facing the healthcare industry. Many patients still experience unequal access, outcomes and experiences based on their race, gender, geography or socioeconomic status. Women, for example, make up just over half of the U.S. population, yet patterns in how healthcare is delivered, accessed and studied reveal persistent imbalances that disadvantage them.
This blog explores four key areas where gender gaps persist in healthcare and how technology has the potential to close them by improving access, reducing barriers and personalizing care.
1. Quality of care
Women have long faced disparities in the way they are treated by healthcare providers, often experiencing their symptoms being overlooked, underdiagnosed or undertreated compared to men. For example, a 2024 study found that emergency department clinicians gave less pain medication to women than men at similar pain levels. Even routine procedures like IUD insertions reflect the broader pain gap – a 2025 analysis found that only 5.36% of outpatient insertions included same-day pain or anxiety medication. Despite being in use for over a century, it wasn't until 2025 that ACOG officially recommended offering local anesthetic options for the procedure.
One of the most astounding healthcare gender disparities is the time to diagnosis – a disparity that cuts across many conditions, including autoimmune disorders, cardiovascular disease and even cancer. These diseases are frequently diagnosed later in women, in part because symptoms may present differently and are too often dismissed or misattributed. A study of over 200,000 patients found that women waited 21 days longer for diagnosis of acute conditions and 134 days longer for long-term conditions as compared to men.
2. Access to care
Access to healthcare is not experienced equally by men and women, with women facing disproportionately greater delays, barriers, and burdens that limit their ability to get the care they need. Over 3.0% of women, compared to 1.6% of men, delayed or skipped medical care because the time investment (i.e., the drive, waiting room, exam and pharmacy) was deemed too high. This gap reflects the disproportionate burden life places on women who are typically the primary child carers in the family while juggling work and more domestic household responsibilities than men. Additionally, 5.7% of women, versus 3.5% of men, reported difficulty obtaining appointments when needed - compounded by things like provider shortages and scheduling inflexibility.
3. Representation in research
Women remain disproportionately underrepresented in clinical research, a gap that has persisted for decades. For example, women's health research accounts for only 4% of life science R&D funding, even though women aged 44–64 account for 24% higher healthcare spending compared to men. In heart and stroke studies, female participation remains around 33%, despite cardiovascular disease being the leading cause of death for women.
Despite biological differences that influence how diseases manifest and how treatments work, women are often excluded or under-enrolled in trials. This underrepresentation means that much of the evidence guiding today's standards of care is built on data that does not fully reflect women's experiences, risks, or outcomes.
4. Health outcomes
Despite living longer on average, women experience poorer health outcomes than men across a range of conditions. These inequities reveal systemic gaps in research, diagnosis and care delivery that disproportionately disadvantage women. For example, women are more than twice as likely to die after a heart attack compared to men. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death among women, yet only one-third of heart and stroke study participants are women.
The disparities in access, quality and representation in care have a financial cost, as well. Employed women in the U.S. pay 18% more annually for healthcare than men, excluding maternity care. That translates to $15 billion more spent by working women each year.
Technology as the catalyst for equity
Technology has proven to be a catalyst for equitable healthcare in several notable ways – from lowering geographic and time barriers to care with telehealth to better integrating key social determinants of health into care plans. However, for technology to drive meaningful change in how care is accessed and experienced across all populations, it must be grounded in data. And for data to be a catalyst for this type of innovation, it must be complete, accurate and inclusive.
We can't fix what we can't measure—and we can't measure what we don't collect. First, we need the infrastructure in place to allow health systems to collect women's health data equitably, cleanly and completely. Next, we need the right technology in place to reach women where they are—whether that's through digital access, mobile clinics, or telehealth. And, once we have collected the right data, we must implement the technology needed to interpret it – like analytics, dashboards and visualizations. When these insights are made visible and actionable, we begin driving clinician behavior change to close gender-based care gaps.
For example, the first step in making pain management more equitable might be as simple as a real-time pain dashboard in the ED that measures the (1) time to order and (2) the type of pain management prescribed for patients by gender, in real time. Another example is reducing gender-based disparity in accessing timely appointments by running analytics on scheduling abandonment, appointment cancellations, and no-shows based on gender and using that information to make resourcing decisions to increase provider availability accordingly. Perhaps the underrepresentation of women in clinical research could be mitigated by providing healthcare institutions with a simple, GenAI-based tool that instantly matches women with eligible clinical trials that are within a 30-mile radius of their home.
AI and the future
If gender-based gaps exist in healthcare today, AI will only magnify them unless equity is built into its foundation. That means ensuring the data it is trained on is representative, inclusive and ethically sourced. If we can consistently design and deploy responsible AI, it can be a game-changer for closing the gender gaps in care, as we've already seen with solutions that improve diagnostic accuracy in conditions that disproportionately affect women, like endometriosis and autoimmune diseases.
At WWT, we partner with healthcare organizations to turn possibility into progress. From building the infrastructure to collect meaningful data, to transforming that data into actionable insights, to deploying solutions that close gaps and improve care—we help make equity not just a goal, but a reality.
Technology is not the end—it's the enabler. When it's grounded in inclusive data and deployed with intention, it becomes a beacon of hope for a more equitable healthcare system. Together, we can build systems that see women, serve women and support better outcomes for all.