First Lady Unveils $500M Investment in Women’s Health at Clinton Global Initiative

NEW YORK — First Lady Jill Biden traveled to New York City on Monday to unveil new initiatives to address health inequities experienced by women across the United States, including an annual investment of at least $500 million that will go to women’s health research.

The investment, which is being made through the Department of Defense, will fund research on conditions that affect women uniquely, disproportionately, or differently — such as ovarian cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and musculoskeletal injuries. 

The White House emphasized that this new commitment is consistent with President Joe Biden’s executive order on Advancing Women’s Health Research and Innovation as well as the Defense Department’s broader efforts to support the health of the women it serves and the medical readiness of the force.

The department currently provides medical care to more than 230,000 active duty military women and nearly 2 million military retirees, as well as their family members.

“Since launching the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research last November, the first lady has put the spotlight on the urgent need to close the gap in how we fund and approach women’s health research,” said the first lady’s press secretary, Vanessa Valdivia. 

“The Biden-Harris administration has quickly mobilized to make progress in less than a year, and in the months ahead the first lady will continue to push the work of this initiative forward, and build on the incredible momentum and enthusiasm we’ve seen across the public and private sectors,” Valdivia said.

Biden made the announcement at this year’s Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York, moments before the organization honored her husband with the 2024 Clinton Global Citizen Award.

“We honor him today, not just for what he’s accomplished, but for the way he has done it,” former President Bill Clinton said as he presented the award. 

In announcing the funding, the first lady said “women are really hungry for [the] kind of information” the funded research will uncover.

Prior to the announcement, Biden joined Chelsea Clinton and Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice on stage to discuss women’s health research as part of a mainstage session.

As vice chair of the Clinton Foundation, Clinton wears a number of hats, among them is serving as vice chair of the Clinton Health Access Initiative. She uses her platform to increase awareness around issues such as vaccine hesitancy, childhood obesity and health equity.

Dr. Montgomery Rice, a renowned infertility specialist and researcher, is the sixth president of Morehouse School of Medicine and the first woman to lead the freestanding medical institution.

During their session they spoke at length about the ways in which they break down barriers between peer institutions, cultivate partnerships and community, and align values and programs to create new, specific, and measurable ways to support one another.

They also discussed the rapid progress being made by the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, which was launched less than a year ago with the goal of fundamentally changing how we fund and approach women’s health research. 

Monday’s event followed the first lady joining the president’s cabinet meeting last week, where she expressed gratitude to the represented agencies for their continued progress and support for the initiative’s goals.

It marked the first time the first lady had joined a cabinet meeting and was seen as a sign of how high a priority women’s health issues will be as the Biden administration enters its final months.

 The Initiative — led by the Office of the First Lady and the White House Gender Policy Council and chaired by Dr. Carolyn Mazure — consists of executive departments and agencies across the federal government, including the departments of Health and Human Services, Defense, and Veterans Affairs, and White House offices, such as the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. 

Earlier this year, as reported in The Well News, the President’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health committed $100 million for transformative research and development in women’s health for its first-ever Sprint for Women’s Health. 

According to the White House, ARPA-H has received an unprecedented response to its call for proposals, receiving submissions from a mix of scientific visionaries from across the globe and sectors.

In addition, the National Institutes of Health launched a new agency-wide effort to invest $200M for new, interdisciplinary women’s health research — a first step towards the transformative central Fund on Women’s Health.

This effort will allow NIH to fund ambitious, multi-faceted research projects such as research on the impact of perimenopause and menopause on heart health, brain health and bone health.

More recently the Department of Health and Human Services announced $12.5M in new funding to address the unique mental health and substance use treatment needs of women. 

The new Women’s Behavioral Health Technical Assistance Center is intended to fill vital gaps in health care providers’ knowledge and ability to treat the mental health and substance use conditions of women across the nation.

The NIH has launched a new challenge to accelerate the development of innovative technologies for the diagnosis of endometriosis, a debilitating condition that affects about one in 10 women and often takes years to be diagnosed. 

NIH will award $3M in prizes to innovators who develop new technologies that make it easier and quicker to diagnose endometriosis.

Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation issued its first-ever call for novel and transformative science and engineering research focused entirely on women’s health. 

The foundation has also convened experts in the fields of engineering, biomedical research and advanced computing to identify ways to improve women’s health research — including how artificial intelligence and machine learning can revolutionize our understanding of menopause.

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