Women’s health is no longer emerging — it is accelerating. Across performance science, biotechnology, and preventative care, innovation is reshaping how women train, recover, and live in their bodies. Despite clear commercial success, women’s health remains comparatively underfunded at the early stage, suggesting that capital allocation has yet to fully align with the sector’s demonstrated potential.

Yet innovation alone does not determine which ideas endure.

Behind every breakthrough sits an infrastructure — legal frameworks, ownership structures, and capital access — quietly shaping who is able to scale, who maintains control, and which solutions ultimately reach the women they were designed to serve.

For Jessie Gabriel, founder of corporate law firm All Places and a leading advocate for gender equity in business and venture capital, these structural forces are impossible to ignore. As women’s health transitions from a historically underfunded category into a powerful investment frontier, the conversation must expand beyond products and into the systems that govern their growth.

Because the future of women’s health will not be defined solely by what is invented — but by who owns it. To understand how this imbalance plays out in practice, Jessie Gabriel offers her perspective.

When Innovation Meets Capital Reality - Jessie Gabriel

Most of the time, people are motivated to solve their own problems. So it makes sense that most of the people out there innovating in women’s health are women. What’s the problem with that? Ideas generated by female entrepreneurs have been dramatically underfunded. It’s easy to hear people repeat the figure that only 2% of venture funding goes to women and become numb to it. So let’s put this in perspective. In 2025, 1.3% of venture funding went to all-female teams, and 61.6% went to all-male teams. That means that for every $1.3M raised by an all-female team, an all-male team raised $61.6M. That is a difference of 47x.

In some areas, you still have a path to success without taking on accelerated funding. But that is not the case in healthcare. Many healthcare solutions require significant time and money before they are effective, can be scaled, or are approved for human use. What happens as a result? Ideas don’t get funded and don’t get to market, and that deprives women of potentially life-changing, life-improving, or life-extending care. Even if you manage to scrape together a few million to launch your first product, there is no guarantee you will be able to raise a significant Series A or Series B to keep your momentum going.

It’s easy to see how this plays out in our day-to-day lives. Look at the options for contraception for men and women and their relative side effects. Look at how we check for breast cancer or cervical cancer versus how we check for prostate cancer. Look at Oya. I had no idea until I met Mitch that the leggings I was wearing were leading to yeast infections and skin irritation. Fortunately, she had already solved the problem. Since then, I only wear Oya leggings. Problem, solution. But if you don’t wear tight-fitting leggings every day or have never experienced a yeast infection, this might not seem important to you.

People try to argue that capitalism and private markets are the great equalizer: if you have a great idea, it will get funded. That is just not the case. Decisions about funding companies, particularly at the earlier stages, are largely driven by subjective determinations about your “belief” in the founder or your personal connection to the problem they are trying to solve. My hope is that, the more data there are out there putting hard numbers on this opportunity, the more investors will start giving it a hard look. Women’s healthcare has been underfunded. That presents an opportunity for outsized returns relative to other sectors. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to get it, you just need to understand basic math.

Aligning Capital with Opportunity

The data are no longer ambiguous. Women are building companies rooted in lived experience, consumers are demanding better solutions, and exits are steadily increasing. The market has spoken.

What remains is alignment — between capital and opportunity, between regulation and innovation, between belief and evidence.

Women’s health does not lack ideas, demand, or capable founders. What it has lacked is proportionate investment and the structural support required to scale. As more data continues to quantify the size and durability of the opportunity, the gap between performance and funding becomes increasingly difficult to justify.

Markets tend to correct mispriced risk over time. If women’s health has been underestimated, that does not make it marginal — it makes it undervalued.

Innovation is already happening. The question now is who will build the infrastructure that allows it to grow.

Through her work at All Places, Jessie advises founders and investors navigating the legal realities of ownership, capital, and scale. Her perspective reinforces a central truth: sustainable progress in women’s health will depend not only on breakthrough ideas, but on the systems designed to support them.

Send In Your Questions Here

Next issue we’re diving into “Training Smarter, Not Harder: How Home Fitness Setups + Better Gear Reduce Injury for Everyone.” We will break down how home fitness innovation (Flexia), intelligently designed strength environments (Macrofit), and health-forward activewear (Oya Apparel) work together to support injury prevention from every angle.

So let us know what you want to understand better about this topic? What feels unclear?

Send us your questions. We’ll bring them to the expert.

Sources & Further Reading

• Follow the Exits: Women’s Health — AOA Dx

• Fall 2025 Market Intelligence Report on Women’s Performance Health — Snatch Health

• Top 10 Deals of 2025: Laborie Acquires the JADA® System for $465M — Amboy Street Ventures