Jill Biden announced a plan that could be a game-changer for the health of women serving in the U.S. military.
The current First Lady took the stage this week at the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual conference, a gathering designed to discuss solutions to the world’s biggest problems. There, Biden revealed a new plan to invest at least $500 million — mostly funded by the U.S. Department of Defense — into military women’s health, an announcement met with cheers and applause.
The money will be used primarily to support biomedical research into conditions impacting hundreds of thousands of active duty and veteran women alike — the latter is, after all, the fastest growing group of veterans. These efforts include exploring why these particular groups of women are more likely to face immune disorders than their male counterparts who are or have served. “Women are really hungry for this kind of information,” Biden said to the crowd. “We don’t have the answers.”
It’s the latest in a string of supportive moves on behalf of women’s health from the Biden-Harris administration, and the FLOTUS herself. Last month, the administration announced $558 million in funding to improve maternal health throughout the U.S. And in February of this year, Biden announced the Sprint For Women’s Health initiative, which involved a $100 million investment into several largely underfunded research areas. For example, while about 68% of women have uterine fibroids, a paltry amount of current medical research is directed toward combating such reproductive issues, according to women’s health website Perel. Other health conditions that solely, or disproportionately, impact women – yet receive minimal research funding – include endometriosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and chronic fatigue syndrome.
At the conference, Biden said that medical research generally focuses on men’s bodies and “what men need.” She continued with yet more examples of the disparity: “I don’t think we realize…really the issue of heart health — how many women die of heart health…or that Alzheimer’s affects women more than it does men. Same with MS [multiple sclerosis], same with autoimmune diseases.”
Biden then mentioned the fact that the U.S. loses 1.8 billion working hours from women per year due to another gendered medical problem: menopause symptoms. “They either have insomnia and they don’t sleep all night,” Biden said. “They get migraines….they’re aching.”
Women leaders, throughout the CGI conference, discussed a range of other challenges that impact women and girls all over the world, both within and beyond the U.S. military – including climate change, which can also have a direct, and outsized, impact on their survival. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, also present at the event, noted that climate change “is threatening women’s livelihoods, their health, their safety — and threatening to reverse decades of progress toward building a more gender-equal world.”
Clinton also advocated for more female representation in leadership to help improve women’s health. To that aim, Women in the Sustainable Economy Initiative (WISE) announced, via Clinton, an additional $681 million to support women and girls combating the climate crisis. WISE and its 33 partners will be leveraging $2 billion, in all, to expand women’s access to well-paying jobs in climate finance and land rights advocacy, Clinton said.
A sound investment, experts note, because when it comes to advancing research in women’s health and wellbeing – for those serving, and those beyond the military – progress cannot be a lone effort. Said Biden, “We all have to be involved to make a difference.”
