McKinsey: Closing the UK's Women's Health Gap Is a £36 Billion Opportunity

A new report from the McKinsey Health Institute, produced with input from the World Economic Forum, puts a hard number on an argument Fern has been making since our first day of operation: closing the women's health gap in the UK is not a moral nicety, it's one of the largest untapped economic opportunities in the country.

The gap, in numbers

UK women spend around 24% more time in poor health than men — the equivalent of 54 days a year, against 44 for the average man. Closing that gap could add roughly £36 billion a year to UK GDP by 2040, and give women around ten additional healthy days a year. For scale, £36 billion a year is comparable to the entire UK life sciences sector's current annual contribution to the economy.

It's not just reproductive health

Only 7% of UK women's health burden comes from conditions unique to women — gynecological conditions, maternal health, menopause. The remaining 60% comes from conditions that affect both sexes but hit women disproportionately: asthma, stroke, migraine, arthritis, depression. That's a sharper version of the same point we made in our own one-year reflection: the 95% of women's disease burden that isn't reproductive health is where the biggest, least-priced opportunity sits.

“These figures also make clear that women's health is not a niche agenda. It is a mainstream health, workforce, and economic priority.”

McKinsey Health Institute, "Closing the women's health gap: The United Kingdom's £36 billion opportunity" (2026)

Three drivers: efficacy, care delivery, data

McKinsey attributes around two-thirds of the gap to an efficacy problem: diagnostics and treatments built on a "default male" evidence base. Women experience severe treatment-related side effects roughly a third more often than men across cancer types overall, and nearly 50% more often with immunotherapy. Standard coronary angiograms, calibrated to large-vessel blockages typical in men, routinely miss the small-vessel disease more common in women, producing false-negative diagnoses for real cardiac events.

The remaining third is a care-delivery problem: uneven pathways, slower referrals, fragmented follow-up. Women have historically been up to 59% more likely than men to receive an incorrect initial heart attack diagnosis — linked to a 70% higher risk of death within 30 days. Average time to an endometriosis diagnosis in the UK is now nine years and four months, rising to eleven years for ethnically diverse communities. Layered on top of both is a data problem: women remain undercounted and understudied, so the system often can't see where they're being missed in the first place.

Where our portfolio already sits

The report names a "cervical cancer screening diagnostic tampon" among the innovations backed by the NHS Innovation Accelerator — the same category of at-home, self-sampling diagnostic that Fern-backed Daye has built and scaled. It's a small detail, but it's exactly the validation we look for: independent, third-party evidence that the adoption model we backed early is the one policymakers are now pointing to as a template.

The capital gap is the opportunity

Women's health still receives just 6% of global private healthcare investment, with women's health-specific companies capturing less than 1% — funding that skews heavily early-stage, reinforcing a perception of risk. But new exit data tells a different story: 276 women's health exits between 2000 and 2024 totalled over $100 billion, with capital efficiency ratios of 12 to 18 times for diagnostics and devices. That gap between perceived risk and realised return is, in one line, why Fern exists.

McKinsey's proposed path forward — make women visible in data, turn evidence into standard pathways, invest in innovation, mobilise capital to scale what works, and embed women's health as a workforce and productivity priority — reads like a policy-level version of our own IDEA™ value chain. The evidence base keeps getting stronger. The work now is deploying capital against it with the same discipline the evidence demands.