Gendered Health Pathways: The Case for a Feminist Lens in Health Data
by: Abha Saxena and Jodi DiProfio
Despite representing half of humanity, women remain significantly underrepresented in early pharmaceutical research, leading to critical gaps in knowledge about their health and treatment outcomes. Critical women’s health conditions, such as menopause, cervical cancer and endometriosis are under-researched and underfunded. And while there has been some progress in disaggregation of health data by sex, most health information systems still fail to consider how gender roles shape exposure to risk factors like tobacco, poor diet, alcohol use, and pollution, including the significant burden women face from cooking over wood, charcoal and other solid fuels. This limitation is particularly consequential for non-communicable diseases like diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease, obscuring crucial differences in risk and outcomes among men, women and gender diverse people. For example, cardiovascular disease, a leading cause of death in women, is often under-recognized due to health data largely based on studies that disproportionately or exclusively sampled men.
This persistent gap, known as the gender data gap, reflects deep-rooted biases in how health data is collected, analyzed, and funded. It stems from long-standing inequities in health policy, research funding, and the ways health outcomes are measured, often ignoring the distinct needs of women, girls, men, boys, and gender-diverse populations. Without comprehensive gender-responsive data, health interventions struggle to address disparities effectively, letting inequities persist and deepen.
At the Global Center for Gender Equality (GCfGE), we champion gender-responsive practices across health and data ecosystems, fostering innovation, strengthening evidence, and advancing collaboration to build systems that serve all people equitably. We celebrate breakthroughs that advance the field forward and help build a stronger foundation for a feminist approach to health data.
Why does a feminist lens matter for health-related data?
Historically, health data has excluded and invisibilized the experiences of women and marginalized groups, leading not just to incomplete and biased data, but also harmful gaps in policy and care. Over the years, medical research has relied on data from the ‘neutral male’ as standard, and women’s health is often either narrowed to reproductive health or considered too complicated and expensive for scientific study because of hormonal cycles. This reductive approach ignores important differences in areas such as cardiovascular health, mental health, and other chronic lifestyle conditions. Research has lagged in systematically collecting and analyzing sex- and age- disaggregated data, let alone accounting for intersecting identities like race and class, among others. Even during the COVID19 pandemic, countries were slow to report and analyze data by sex, age and other dimensions. Research now shows significant gendered impacts of the pandemic on both COVID-related and indirect outcomes, such as teen pregnancy and gender-based violence. While men were more prone to contracting COVID-19, evidence from eight countries across the Asia- Pacific region showed that women had less access to information, increased burden of unpaid care work and domestic work, were less likely to be covered by insurance, suffered disproportionate mental and emotional health consequences, and faced challenges in accessing medical care (UN Women, 2020).
Decisions about health data and its use have been controlled by those with the most power: governments and corporations, further distancing essential public services from those they mean to serve. Additionally, while digital health technologies bring tremendous opportunity in advancing access, data surveillance, and data insecure health apps can raise concerns around privacy violations, location tracking and confidentiality, particularly for women, adolescents and immigrants. For instance, menstrual and fertility tracking apps may collect and share sensitive reproductive data with corporations without privacy safeguards and with family members who share a device. Evidence also shows a linkage between personal data collection and a heightened risk of intimate partner violence, a risk that disproportionately impacts Black, Asian American and multiracial women in the US (Figueroa et. al., 2021). Similarly, algorithms trained on biased, incomplete, or male-default datasets often perpetuate harmful gender stereotypes and biases.
A feminist lens, therefore, becomes imperative to ask the important questions: data for whom, and for what? It also calls on policies, systems, and programs to understand and account for power differences rooted in intersecting identities like gender, age, ethnicity, racial/caste origins, disability status, migration, or geographic location that can cause differentiated health outcomes.
Gender equality and human rights activists and researchers, like our colleagues at Ladysmith, have done important work in laying out rights-based and gender-responsive data approaches for health data to be truly representative of all. Essential approaches include:
Collect and analyze intersectional data: Along with sex-disaggregated data, collect and analyze gender data that highlights intersecting social identities and their impact on health outcomes. For instance, data on age, race, class, disability, ethnicity, migration status, and religion can make visible additional factors that women, girls, and gender-diverse people face with respect to disease distribution, risk exposure, service utilization, and access. We won’t see disparities unless we choose to look for them.
Count numbers. Account for narratives: Quantitative data is enriched when accompanied by qualitative insights that reflect lived experiences. For instance, narratives from women and girls on barriers to access and experience with care can help health systems to truly adapt to meet their health care needs.
Co-design matters: Ensuring engagement of and co-designing health research with people who hold interesting identities and face structural barriers is imperative to address the inherent biases and power imbalances in conventional health research. Formal partnerships with women’s groups, and other community-based organizations, backed by funding, can ensure that health systems engage with communities as valued partners and not just the subjects of research. This approach can begin to decolonize and democratize data systems by challenging dominant paradigms that focus on narrow biomedical questions to those that transform power dynamics and patriarchy.
Ensure representative leadership from health-care institutions to last-mile service provision: Bridging gender and diversity gaps in health systems leadership is critical to ensure that decisions that shape health priorities reflect equity and inclusion. For instance, advancing leadership of women of color, and people from gender-diverse groups, at corporations, academia and organizations would help spark tailored solutions. Ample evidence shows that women’s leadership and increased diversity across health systems leads to better decision-making, increased productivity, effective results and greater sustainability. (See for instance, Mousa et. al., 2021 & Schmidt et. Al., 2023) Equally important for equitable and accountable health systems is to strengthen last-mile service delivery by ensuring fair pay, safe working conditions, and feedback mechanisms for female frontline workers.
Build unbiased, ethical, and gender-responsive digital health and AI technologies: Gender responsive digital health design requires moving beyond the ‘neutral male’ to ensuring that women from diverse backgrounds are actively involved, fairly compensated, and meaningfully included in shaping tools and platforms. For instance, investing in incorporating frontline workers’ feedback can make community-level data collection tools and the user experience more inclusive, equitable and effective.
Spotlight on Innovation
Launched in 2025, a new tool advancing rights-based, gender-responsive ‘health data for all’ is Gendered Health Pathways (GHP), developed by Global Health 50/50. This innovative data visualization tool illustrates and addresses gender inequalities in health journeys and outcomes for some of the world’s deadliest diseases. By integrating standardized global data sources, including the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, NCD Risk Factor Collaboration, UNAIDS, and the World Health Organization, the GHP offers a holistic, sex- and age-disaggregated view of health pathways for HIV, diabetes, and hypertension across countries. The tool traces the journey from risk exposure through diagnosis, treatment, and mortality, highlighting where and how gender disparities manifest along the care cascade. Its aim is to guide targeted, gender-responsive prevention and treatment strategies that can reduce morbidity and mortality globally.
The GHP data framework addresses power imbalances by:
Uncovering Invisible Inequalities: By tracking health outcomes with sex‑disaggregated data, GHP reveals gender-related disparities often overlooked, such as differences in risk exposure, diagnosis rates and access to treatment. Its intuitive interface enables stakeholders across the health ecosystem to query, compare, and visualize data easily.
Empowering Policy and Local Action: GHP is designed not to only visualize health disparities, but also to drive gender-responsive policies and programming. Ministries of Health, community organizations, and advocates can access GHP to inform decision-making, allocate resources more equitably, and advocate for systemic change.
Catalyzing Collaboration and Further Development: Built with input from community health organizations and practitioners, GHP’s indicators and methodologies reflect diverse expertise. While it currently tracks only three health conditions, GHP is inviting collaborators to co-create additional pathways, contribute to its development as an open-source tool, and pilot in-country applications.
A Call to Transform Health Data Equity
The GHP and other health data innovators are pushing rights-based, gender-responsive approaches forward, yet much work remains. Achieving true equity requires moving beyond simply collecting data to taking deliberate, action informed by intersectional feminist thinking. To make real progress against persistent morbidity and mortality gaps, we need fresh thinking and bold commitments. This means breaking the cycle of gender data gaps by centering feminist principals, addressing systemic power imbalances, and leveraging innovative tools to support decision-makers in transforming data into better health outcomes for all.
References
Feraldi A, Zarulli V, Buse K, Hawkes S, Chang AY (2025) Sex-disaggregated data along the gendered health pathways: A review and analysis of global data on hypertension, diabetes, HIV, and AIDS. PLoS Med 22(5): e1004592. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1004592
Wilkes, R. & Karimi, A. (2024). From intersectional invisibility to visibility: Black women in Health Disparity Data and Quantitative Intersectional Models. Current Research in Behavioral Sciences. Volume 6, 2024, 100149