$20 Billion: Latest Scare-Tactic of the Women’s Health Lobby

PRESS RELEASE

Contact: Henry Herrera

Telephone: +1-301-801-0608

$20 Billion: Latest Scare-Tactic of the Women’s Health Lobby

July 13, 2026 — On nearly every health indicator, men are lagging behind women. Men are dying five years sooner, account for the vast majority of workplace deaths, and face suicide rates 3-4 times higher than women.

Despite these disparities, public health programs continue to devote far more resources to women’s health than to men’s health:

The federal Department of Health and Human Services maintains 7 offices of women’s health — and zero offices of men’s health (1).
Each year the National Institutes of Health allocates 2-3 times more funding for women’s research than men’s health research (2).
Every state public health department operates a program focused on women’s or maternal health, yet only three states – Illinois, Connecticut, and North Dakota – have offices of men’s health (3).

In past decades, women’s health advocates blocked efforts to address men’s health by claiming — falsely — that women had been “excluded” and “underrepresented” from medical research.

In 1993, the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine made the categorical – and spurious — claim that “There is little doubt that women have been systematically excluded as subjects for study.” And LaRosa and Pinn lamented, “The exclusion of some women from clinical studies may sometimes be valid, but not all the women all the time.” (4)

Subsequent analyses have thoroughly debunked these assertions. A Government Accountability Office report revealed, “GAO found that women were a majority of the clinical trial participants in the new drug applications (NDA) it examined, and that every NDA included enough women in the pivotal studies to be able to statistically demonstrate that the drug is effective in women.” More recent data show that women accounted for 58% of all participants in NIH-funded research over the past 28 years — clear evidence against claims of under-representation (5).

Today, momentum is building to establish the first-ever Office of Men’s Health in the Department of Health and Human Services. Legislation (H.R. 7602) has been introduced in Congress. And DHHS Assistant Secretary for Health Brian Christine has expounded on the “crisis” of men’s health (6).

Yet the women’s health lobby continues to promote the same discredited narrative. The Society for Women’s Health Research, for example, claims that women remain “often underrepresented and inadequately considered in medical and public health research.” (7)

On July 15, the group and its partners will publicly release a proposal in Washington, DC to close what they falsely call the “women’s health gap” — at an estimated cost of $20 billion to American taxpayers (8).

Americans rightly take pride in the world-class universities and research institutions located in the United States. It is troubling when advocacy organizations exploit false claims of “exclusion” and “under-representation” to justify imposing a $20 billion burden on taxpayers. A more balanced and evidence-based approach to public health programs is long overdue (9).

SAVE – Stop Abusive and Violent Environments – is a 501(c)3 organization working to assure due process, fairness, and equal opportunities for men.

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