Early last year I wrote that women’s health represented one of the most underexplored, undercapitalized opportunities in the global economy — a market where the WEF and McKinsey had put a number on the prize: close the women’s health gap and add roughly $1 trillion to global GDP a year by 2040. The thesis was that smart capital would move toward that gap because the returns were sitting there unclaimed.

A year and a half on, the awareness has arrived. The capital mostly hasn’t.

We are living through a longevity boom. According to Longevity.Technology’s 2024 Annual Longevity Investment Report , investment in the sector more than doubled to $8.49 billion in 2024. Money is pouring into the science and consumer economy of aging well — diagnostics, supplements, hormone optimization, wearables, longevity clinics — and, as the Stanford Center on Longevity notes, investors are betting heavily that the sector can scale fast enough to capture it. Much of that capital is aimed at helping people who are already relatively healthy and relatively wealthy become marginally more optimized. That is a legitimate market.

But it is not the frontier.

Even within longevity, the highest returns aren’t in the exotic science. The World Economic Forum’s 2026 Longevity Dividend report found that three low-tech interventions — home safety improvements, hearing aid access, and physical activity programs — could unlock $5.8 trillion in healthcare savings by 2040.

And the most neglected basics of all belong to women. The real frontier is the vast, underserved base of demand — women whose basic health needs the system was never designed to meet, and, even more so, the billions in emerging markets for whom a first point of quality care does not yet exist. Women’s health captures only 6% of private healthcare investment, and companies focused exclusively on women’s health attract less than 1%.

The capital isn’t just too small. It’s aimed at the wrong targets, on two axes at once. By condition , it clusters in a narrow reproductive and maternal band and ignores the far larger burden women carry everywhere else. By geography , it clusters in a handful of wealthy markets and ignores the places where the need is most acute. Two untapped frontiers, hiding in plain sight — and the capital has barely touched either.

The First Frontier: The Wrong Conditions

Part of the problem is definitional. “Women’s health” as an investment category is still largely boxed into a narrow band — reproductive and maternal health and cancers focused on reproductive organs — that together account for nearly 90% of investment but represent just 5-8% of the total female health burden. Looked at another way, McKinsey estimates that most of the female health burden — roughly 56 percent — comes from conditions that either hit women harder or show up differently in them. The remaining 43 percent comes from conditions that aren’t distinctly women’s issues at all — cardiovascular disease, autoimmune conditions, mental health, the diseases of aging — but they remain studied less in women, and funded as if women were a rounding error.

When the category is drawn too small, the capital follows it into the small box. Investors conclude the market is niche. It is not niche. It is mismeasured. Women make the majority of household health decisions and control a rising share of global spending, yet remain among the smallest recipients of targeted health investment. A market with that much demand and that little supply is not a risk to be managed. It is an opportunity being overlooked because of how we’ve labeled it.

The Second Frontier: The Wrong Places

Here is the part I know firsthand, and the part almost no one writing about this opportunity accounts for: the trillion-dollar prize is global, but the capital is not. McKinsey’s research spans nearly 200 countries, and the human stakes fall overwhelmingly outside the wealthy world — 94% of pregnancy-related deaths occur in low-resource settings. Capital has moved in the opposite direction — chasing the same narrow band of conditions in the same high-income markets, while the largest untapped pool of women’s health demand sits somewhere else entirely.

That pool is in the emerging and frontier economies, where women are simultaneously the majority of patients and the majority of the unserved — where the barrier isn’t a six-month wait for a specialist but the absence of one, and where the question isn’t how to optimize longevity but how to deliver the basics. Here the societal returns are documented exhaustively: every $1 spent on contraceptive care in low- and middle-income countries saves $2.48 in downstream maternal and newborn costs; the UN puts the return on family planning and maternal health above $8 for every $1. And that’s the return on the one slice that has been funded and measured; the broader burden in these markets is larger still, and almost entirely uncapitalized.

The investor return, on the other hand, has almost no published track record at all. That absence is not evidence the returns aren’t there. It is evidence that capital hasn’t shown up to earn them.

I know they are there, because I spent the last decade earning them. In Bangladesh, I founded a private healthcare system — now serving more than a million patients, most of them women — in a market where nearly everyone pays out of pocket. It was built as a direct to consumer business: one that had to win patients who could take their money anywhere and come back only if the care was worth it. Patient-centered care can be built where resources are scarcest — and the demand is largest and least served precisely where capital is most absent. That is what makes it a market, not a mission.

The capital markets have run the other way — toward the most saturated, most regulated, highest-cost market on earth — and called that the frontier.

None of this resolves on its own, and I am wary of the easy prescription. But three shifts would move real money toward the real opportunity.

First, redraw the category. As long as women’s health is defined as reproductive health, investors will keep pricing a small market. Fund the full burden — cardiac, autoimmune, metabolic, cognitive, the diseases of aging as they actually manifest in women — and the addressable market and its returns look entirely different.

Second, follow the demand, not the demographics of the last fundable deal. The concentration of women’s health capital in wealthy markets is a habit, not an analysis. The capital that keeps flowing to incremental optimization for the already-well would compound faster deployed against unmet basic demand — including, and especially, in the markets development finance has spent two decades declining to back at scale.

Third, put more women in the rooms where health capital is allocated. Women are the majority of patients and caregivers and a minority of the people deciding where health dollars go. Women form almost 70 percent of the global health workforce, but Mckinsey estimates they hold only 25 percent of senior roles, and 15 percent of partner-level venture roles. That is not only an equity problem. It is a returns problem: the people closest to the demand are furthest from the capital.

The frontier has not closed. If anything the case is stronger, because the longevity boom has proven there is enormous appetite to invest in women’s health — it has simply been aimed at the wrong slice, measured from the wrong place, and allocated by the wrong people.

I’m speaking at the Livelong Women’s Health Summit in New York on September 25, where a lot of this conversation — what’s proven, what’s promising, and where the real opportunity lies — will be on the table.