The Measure of Progress
Health equity is not a supplement to women’s health policy. It is the measure of whether women’s health policy is working.
Average improvement in women’s health outcomes — without attention to which women are improving and which are not — is not progress. It is statistical concealment. The populations experiencing the worst outcomes are the test case for whether any policy actually works.
The Data
Sixteen percent of women in the United States report fair or poor health status. Among Native American women, that number is substantially higher. Among Black and Hispanic women, the figures exceed those of white women by margins that have persisted for decades.
Maternal mortality shows the starkest disparity: Black women die from pregnancy-related causes at two to three times the rate of white women, a gap that persists across income and education levels. This is not primarily a socioeconomic phenomenon. It is a racial one, and it implicates the clinical culture, not just the demographics.
The Social Determinants
Health outcomes for women are shaped by income, housing stability, food security, transportation access, environmental exposure, caregiving burden, and exposure to violence — factors that cluster together and interact with clinical risk in ways that individual medical encounters cannot address.
A serious women’s health equity agenda has to be a housing policy, an economic policy, and an anti-poverty policy, as well as a health care policy. Anything less is treating symptoms.
What We Track
We follow proposed changes to NIMHD and other federal programs addressing health disparities, Medicaid expansion and coverage decisions, community health worker workforce investment, reproductive justice policy, and research funding for studies that include diverse women’s populations.
