Cure Logo

June 10, 2025

Article

7 Women Advocates Who Drive Gender Equity in Health Research

Contributing Editor and Writer

By Marion E. Glick

7 Women Advocates Who Drive Gender Equity in Health Research image 1

Overview

Equal Research Day highlights the persistent disparity of women in medical research and elevates leaders working to change that. Cure spotlights seven women shaping a more equitable future in healthcare innovation.

Equal Research Day, launched by Evvy, raises awareness for inclusive clinical research

June 10 is Equal Research Day, the hallmark of a call-to-action campaign for healthcare innovators, founders, investors and others to advocate for gender equity in health research and change how studies address the health of women.

Leading healthcare entrepreneurs and organizations, including Cure, Foundation for Women’s Health and Women’s Health Access Matters (WHAM), support the event, which Evvy, a female‑founded startup pioneering vaginal microbiome diagnostics, created in 2021.

“We created Equal Research Day to spotlight a simple but devastating truth: women make up over half the population, yet the data that drives our healthcare still doesn’t reflect us,” said Laine Bruzek, Chief Marketing Officer at Evvy. “Until research includes women fully and equitably, we’ll keep seeing the same gaps in care, outcomes, and understanding. Equal Research Day is our call for a future of medicine that is evidence-based, inclusive, and truly built for everyone.”

Bruzek co-founded Evvy with Priyanka Jain, Chief Executive Officer, and Pita Navarro, Chief Scientific Officer. Together, they also picked June 10 for Equal Research Day because it is the date when the 1993 NIH Revitalization Act became a law mandating inclusion of women in federally funded human studies.

Today, women continue to be under-researched, under-diagnosed, and undervalued in medicine, despite projections that the health of women represents a $1 trillion market.

NIH guidance in 2015 made clear that for work it funded, the federal agency expects “the design, analyses and reporting of research in vertebrate animal and human studies should factor in sex as a biological variable.” Accounting for the role of biology should inform basic and clinical investigations of some diseases that differently impact women, like osteoporosis or heart disease; illnesses that disproportionally affect women, like Alzheimer’s; and diseases that only effect women, like ovarian cancer.

Seven Top Women’s Health Advocates to Know

Equal Research Day also is a time to recognize the scientists, entrepreneurs, and policy leaders working to close this gap. Here’s seven Cure thinks you should know, in addition to Evvy’s co-founders:

7 Women Advocates Who Drive Gender Equity in Health Research image 2 Elizabeth Comen, MD

Elizabeth Comen, MD, Co-Director of the new Mignone Women's Health Collaborative at NYU Langone Health, which was built as the biggest, most comprehensive women’s health center in New York City, and offers “a team of more than 125 expert providers across 20 specialties delivers interdisciplinary care through the lens of women’s health.”

7 Women Advocates Who Drive Gender Equity in Health Research image 3 Katy Falco

Katy Falco, Founder of Foundation for Women's Health, which identifies “the areas where funding opportunities do not exist so that we can efficiently fill gaps in women’s health research without duplication of those areas that are already well-funded.”

7 Women Advocates Who Drive Gender Equity in Health Research image 4 Florence P. Haseltine, MD, PhD

Florence P. Haseltine, MD, PhD, Co-founder of the Society for Women's Health Research (SWHR), which is a “thought leader in advancing women’s health through science, policy, and education while promoting research on sex differences to optimize women’s health.”

7 Women Advocates Who Drive Gender Equity in Health Research Carolee Lee

Carolee Lee, Founder and CEO, Women’s Health Access Matters (WHAM!), which works to “increase funding for women’s health research, empower women researchers to study and share sex and gender research, and build a data-driven case for accelerating women’s health research.”

7 Women Advocates Who Drive Gender Equity in Health Research image 6 Liz Powell

Liz Powell, Founder of Women's Health Advocates, “the first professional lobbying organization to unite all people and sectors in advocacy to advance the health of women throughout our lives from head to toe.”

7 Women Advocates Who Drive Gender Equity in Health Research image 7 Dina Radenkovic Turner

Dina Radenkovic Turner, Co-founder and CEO at Gameto, is a physician-turned-serial entrepreneur who founded Gameto to use “cell engineering to develop therapeutics for diseases of the female reproductive system.”

7 Women Advocates Who Drive Gender Equity in Health Research image 8 Alisa Vitti

Alisa Vitti, Founder of Flo Living, a next-gen hormone care platform[M1] , works to shift “the cultural conversation around hormone care and gender inequality in research and biohacking.”

100 Effed Facts About the Gender Health Gap

To build on Equal Research Day, Evvy created a limited-edition coffee table book 100 Effed Facts About the Gender Health Gap. Amplified by a digital campaign, the book reported 100 consequences of women’s exclusion from research, across 12 healthcare areas that included cancer, heart health, fertility and menopause.

“The book is purposefully designed with a literal hole on every page, a visceral metaphor for the gaps in women’s health,” Bruzek explained. “It represents the daily reality faced by millions of women who are navigating a healthcare system that was never built with them in mind.

More Stories