NIH Funding of Men's and Women's Health
Graph of the Week
This week’s graphs illustrate how much money the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States spends on research specifically related to men’s health and women’s health.
Key Points
• The majority of the NIH’s research budget is not sex-specific. Each year, about 80% of the NIH’s research budget goes toward projects that are neither male- nor female-specific. This non-sex-specific funding amounts to about 20-30 billion dollars per year.
• Of the approximate 20% of the budget that is allocated to sex-specific research, most of that budget goes toward women’s health (i.e., diseases or conditions that are female-specific or that predominately affect women).
• Each year, about 14% of the NIH’s research budget goes toward women’s health and about 6% goes toward men’s health. This amounts to about 3.5 – 4.5 billion dollars per year for women’s health and 1.5 – 2 billion dollars per year for men’s health. The NIH invests about half as much money into men’s health than women’s health research.
• In the most recent report by the NIH’s Office for Research on Women’s Health (ORWH), budgets for men’s health in financial years (FY) 2020-2022 were not revealed. In the report, the ORWH stated that the NIH “does not currently calculate or report annual funding associated with projects dedicated solely to men’s health or projects benefiting men and women.” This is why in the graphs below only the absolute dollars spent on women’s health research are presented for FY 2020-2022.
• The NIH does not have an equivalent office for research on men’s health.
Source: Data presented in these graphs were extracted from reports published by the NIH’s ORWH. These reports can be found here.
Bonus Commentary
The NIH is the U.S. government’s agency tasked with funding health and medical research. The data in the graph show that the U.S. government invests significantly more money into women’s health than men’s health research. This is odd considering that males in the U.S. have significantly shorter life expectancies than females. Similar differences in government funding of men’s and women’s health research are also observed in Australia. Thus, data from both the U.S. and Australia show that women’s health is not “underfunded,” as is sometimes claimed by academics, journalists, and public officials.
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Female health include pregnancy?