 Greetings to you all in the room and to members of the media joining us online via our livestream. My name is Trevor Chuiwu. I'm with the World Economic Forum. Welcome to this pivotal press conference on redesigning health with women in mind. If you are engaging with us online, please use the hashtag with 24. Stressing how pivotal this moment is, new data from our report being released this week shows that the women's health gap equates to 75 million lives lost due to poor health or early death per year. Also, did you know that if we close the women's health gap, we could boost the global economy by one trillion per annum. While you percolate on that, let me introduce you to my esteemed panel. On my left, I'm joined by Paola Bejosta, Moetha. Next to her is Dan Vadat, CEO and founder of Huma. We have Sahil Tesfoo, Chief Strategy Officer from Essity and Perfalk, President of Faring Pharmaceuticals. Allow me to paint a picture for you on the wide gap seen in women's health. According to the research in our Closing the Women's Health Gap report, we see women's health not being prioritised. The reasons are clinical trials are mostly done without women in mind. There is lack of investment in understanding a woman's body, meaning with women, there are often delays in diagnosis. Data collected related to women's disease burden excludes or undervalues important conditions. With all of this in mind, Kearney has initiated an open letter to turn the tide on the fundamental problem in preserving women's lives and to close the women's health gap. Having stressed on the very wide women's health gap that ultimately affects all of us and all of society, it is very much encouraging to see momentum around closing the gap and the importance being placed on the intersection between woman and medicine. Paula, she is from Kearney. Let me start with you. Why the open letter and why now? Thank you Trevor and thank you for having me as part of this esteemed panel. It is a sad reality that a really significant gap exists between both the experience and the outcomes of men and women going through the healthcare system. It is a reality that is just not a north reality or south or east or west or developing or developed. It is a global problem and it is one that urgently and deliberately needs to be addressed. Trevor started to allude to some of the underlying reasons why. We see three themes. The first one starts with biology. We do not understand female biology as well as we do that of men. That is not only on what traditionally has been understood as women health, so reproductive health systems, for example endometroces, which is a disease that affects 10% of women of reproductive age, yet it does not see the level of investment or interest in finding a diagnostic or finding a cure. It does not stop there and I think what we need to do is redefine what is women's health because it will start to think about other diseases that are predominantly female like neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, migraine or other diseases like those of autoimmune system. We are not understanding how those manifest in women and we do not understand therefore how can we find cures and therapies that are specific for them. Then if I come to the last part, which is diseases that traditionally have been associated with men, like for example, cardiac disease, they actually manifest differently in women. We are not diagnosing women and we are not treating them and we are seeing a lot of lives lost. The biology and the understanding is really important. This links me to my second point. There is an economic argument. We are not understanding it, the biology, because we are not investing in it and it is not just about the investment in recent and development of these conditions. It is also the investment, for example, in technology where we see digital health being a real area for investment from the private equity community, the VC community, but only 3% of that investment is going into what we know as FemTech. So there is also an issue there. But it's a significant opportunity, like Trevor was outlining, is a trillion dollars that is sitting there as a potential that has to be unlocked. And I think at the heart of it is a societal problem because we are not prioritizing the lives of women in the same way that we do those of men. And this then leads to, we're not investing in it, but we also, when a woman enters the healthcare system, she is more likely to have her concerns dismissed, ignored or potentially missed altogether. And that's why we see the diseases that are common for men and women. Women tend to get diagnosed four years later than a man. So we are painting a bleak picture, but we are hopeful because we know what has to be done. We need to work on policy and advocacy. We need to redesign infrastructure for women's sector care. We need to make sure that capital is flowing into this. We need to rethink research and development, both in what we research, but also in how we research it. We need to close the data gap. And then finally, we need to reimagine medical education because we're still using reference man as the basis for our medical schools. How about reference for them? So we wrote a report on all of this, but reports are only so good because those people that read them are those that are in our eco chamber that want to drive the change. So what we need is mobilization. We need creativity, we need collaboration, and we need community. And that's why the open letter was created so that we could get many organizations from within the healthcare system and the ecosystem and beyond because we need the whole society behind this. And we're really excited about the fact that 53 organizations and it's growing every day have come together to form this village. For many of you that are listening, you probably have got children and know the saying of it takes a village to raise a child. This is a much more complex problem and it is really going to require this entire village. Much more complex unless you have a two year old because the terrible twos are pretty significantly challenging. But we need this village and this is the beginnings of it and we are really excited about what we can achieve because there is such an urgency to get going. We don't want to see 131 years until we close this gap. We wanted to start happening now and to be sitting with all of you next year telling you that we made significant progress. Peh, let me turn it over to you. The Women's Health Alliance that fairing pharmaceuticals is part of was crucial in publishing the Closing the Women's Health Gap Report. What are the main areas of action that we could look at from an economic impact and addressing gender inequality for health? Yes, so first of all the report basically confirms maybe with greater authority and more updated data what I think everybody already knows the closer you are to health care you would be more familiar with it. There is a systemic challenge and Paulina has referred to that. There is a systemic challenge where we basically neglect female diseases or female symptoms of diseases that we're all affected on, which means that they get misinterpreted, they present themselves in different ways and for many years I'm a doctor. There has been this notion about the aching, itching syndrome that women present themselves with, that it hurts somewhere and as a doctor you don't know what to do so you refer it to some psychosomatic. Now we know that's not the case. It is biology. Myocardial infarction in a woman looks different. That means that the doctor needs to be aware of that and recognize those symptoms because if you look for the classic symptoms of a male myocardial infarction which I think many of you in the room already know because we're taught look for this right, but in a woman it looks different. I'm pretty sure that none of you are fully aware of what that looks like and that is biology and to Paulina's point you know those structural problems needs to be overcome. There is a risk with this report even though there's an opportunity as well that it presents such daunting numbers it's like climate change in the end it becomes so big so complex so multifaceted that people just lose heart and energy and says well how are we going to address this and I know Sahil is probably going to say something similar but you know in my world if you have a big audacious challenge you turn that into a big audacious goal that you want to choose to solve but then you solve that problem by approaching it in small small steps every day so of course there is the opportunity when biology and research catches up but that's going to take a long time but it can be done because it's been done before look at oncology and cancer which 50 years ago nobody knew what to do about at all right and today it's the most studied and we say most sophisticated pharmaceutical market and well you can do this it just takes time you can find the biology for why more Alzheimer or or MS affects women but it will take time and maybe you need different therapies and therapy development is it's all take time but there is a here and today the small steps that while we invest and do this and in the end frankly overcome the bias that the world has since most decision makers and policy shapers are men and Paulina has also said that and we should of course sort that out as well but if you start there we will never go anywhere so today there are things that you can do and should do to address medical problems that doesn't need new innovation it needs access and it needs a system for allowing women worldwide to have access to them like like how we are addressing maternal mortality rates like fairing working with the WHO with the UNFPA with MSD for mothers and others to distribute uterotonics that are heat resistant to low and low middle income countries that's just a matter of doing it now because the innovation is there the need is there now you just need to fix it and there are many many of those that we can do while we actually reshape healthcare by also reshaping our views on male and female health and disease so let me come to you the interesting concept of the open letter is that it incorporates organizations that are really really deep into the healthcare ecosystem what can these types of organizations such as yours really bring to the table and close in the gap so let me start by saying that I think we should take as consumer healthcare companies in the space a rights-based approach to the issue so we can see more clearly that there is a real need to act yeah and we don't debate whether we have to do something or don't have to do something so I think a right right space approach will help the conversation so then of course as a global company here we have a platform that we can use we have a platform towards our consumers our customers our investors policymakers and we can raise awareness for the topic it's as simple as that to start talking about the issue and to make it a priority on the different meeting agendas that are out there so that's the first thing we can do in our case very specifically for SET that means raising awareness on the menstrual health gap as an example 1.8 billion people menstruate every month across the globe yet we also know that most of them actually cannot do so in the dignified way because they don't have access to products they don't have access to sanitation facilities that are clean and hygienic they don't have access to education information and thus they cannot fully participate in life private life school life work life and thus they cannot fully unfold their potential and that connects back to this report which then of course could lead to huge implications if we could solve something as I don't want to say as simple but as you know everyday reality like menstruation so that is something you know where we can come very concrete I also want to say to your to your point earlier again menstrual health gap is not a problem of the so-called developing world there is no north south no east west in this issue it's omnipresent okay it's a global issue so we can all work on this also together secondly then I think also we can we can use the power of the brands that we have in the space because sometimes as our corporations or organizations we struggle a little bit you know to be edgy and to you know drive a controversial societal discourse but we have brands out there that can do this for us SET in 2017 we were the first period care brand in the world that showed blood in a period commercial on TV 2017 last time I counted that's not too long ago until then it was blue liquid okay and by doing these kind of let's say a more provocative and also edgy things through our brands again we can drive systemical change and yes it took also changing of media and marketing laws out there to do so but we managed we started small in a couple of countries and now it has become the norm to do so then also we can invest and dedicate resources also back to Paris point first of all it's become specific of what is the problem that we're trying to solve and I think there we need to divide and conquer a little bit and I will come to the point of collaboration and coalition in a second but everyone also has a responsibility here to act on their own and once we have identified where we want to do that then we need to be very serious in terms of the resources that we dedicate to that and the investments that we put into research but also in innovation and I think every company would argue that they take a consumer-centric approach to research and development and innovation but if we really mean it then we also need to understand the consumer in all their diversity in this particular case women in all their diversity to be impactful then the coalitions and the collaborations I also want to say that I think it's super important to collaborate very broadly on this topic because even if you take just a simple not simple but very specific problem like menstrual health you already see it's a very multifaceted issue that touches very different phases of life and also society so we need collaboration across the private and the public sector but I think we need to also think a little bit outside of the box what that collaborations could look like because what brought us here is not going to get us where we need to go so there might be also a couple of unusual suspects that you need to collaborate with also outside of your usual comfort zone and then the last point I'm going to make is on diversity equity and inclusion as organizations as corporate corporations out there in the world we also need to understand that there is a huge independence here and also knock on effects of our ability to also really live a diversity equity and inclusion agenda internally in our organizations if we don't have the representation and you know our own house in order so to say it will be very difficult to move the needle and I think gender equality is a very much underestimated accelerator it can be a speedboat for a lot of these issues that we're just discussing here today but we also need to clean house internally first so you touched on a very important aspect around collaboration and I'll come to it just now but perhaps let me turn it over to Dan um obviously we're seeing very big corporates coming on board onto this open letter community but what do you think would be a role of a small innovative company um coming on board to to to join the movement I think at the end of the day big problems like this it's not that one company or few companies coming together it requires all the players from governments to small companies from big companies to NGOs simply because the problem we are talking it's more than half of the world and there is this saying that they say you know healthy brain is in a healthy body I want to expand that into a healthy family is built around healthy mothers and that means even the impact of it is more than half of the the population so from that perspective then we need everybody and we need the peoples on the top to make this their number one agenda because everyone has priorities and sometimes really important topics they don't fall into that top 10 priority of the top leaders and my hope is some of the smaller companies fast growing companies like Huma which they do have lots of media exposures and impact because we are working with lots of you know we've we've partnered with 15 of the top 20 pharma in the world right I can be that message ambassador I can take that message to the CEO of these pharma if needed to be to ensure that not only their teams are working on it but also this becomes the number one priority for them from the perspective of being just an ambassador and then from another perspective the reason I started for instance Huma was how can we democratize access to health through technologies that it doesn't make a differentiation between men or women poor or rich person and this is the word of technology that we are talking and by enabling individuals to be more empowered not being too dependent to other people other things that may have some biases suddenly we are flipping the problems and coming up with the solutions in a very decentralized way and the beauty of technology from our perspective is it's scalable it is a relatively cost effective even if it's not perfect you can make an update and improve it really really quick as opposed to drugs that if you suddenly realize this drug is not fit for specific patients cohort or group cohort it may take another 10 years or 20 years until you can really reverse basically the challenge and the problem so from that perspective I think companies especially technology companies can can drive the impact but I really want to emphasize and we have this session as well yesterday with a group of amazing people this aim has to become number one agenda I think for VEF for every big company in the world their executive teams and their leaders every head of state and hopefully next year when we do the press release here you have the presidents and the CEO of the biggest and the most important groups and lots of amazing people will hear them to drive this mission forward because as I said this is the single most important topic thanks so here at the world economic forum we believe strongly believe in public private collaboration to move the needle on challenges such as this one perhaps paula and pair if you could give us some thoughts on what you would expect from government it's it's really a pity that the minister couldn't join us for this press conference but perhaps maybe you can share some thoughts on how you you would want to expect an enabling environment that a government could offer to shift the needle yeah so it's it's unfortunate but the minister is on the on the board of the alliance so so she is fully committed to this and you know it's it's what gets asked for gets done it's very simple public private partnership in this case requires some specifics because it's a long way to go but in reality the private sector to to Sahel's point are solution providers and they should be solution providers we should not be policymakers and we should not set the agenda for society we should adapt to the needs of society and fill the needs with the tools that are required and that's how the entire foundation of the private sector and actually capitalism is based there's a need someone fills that need better than others cheaper than others or and you get a space so you can sustain yourself and where there is no need expressed there is no innovation you know because even private sectors we need to sustain our organization we need to get paid and no one gives us money we make money we pay taxes and salaries and with what's left we choose to reinvest in innovation or we can give some a way to philanthropy and as long as we farm out a large part of female health the most urgent female health to philanthropy like i mean admiral fantastic players like the gates or the big foundations and and advocates of various sorts and people willing to contribute even a fairing which is not a big company that's fine you know there's enough money to go around so you can do that way but you will not get the competition and innovation that is required to improve that health care and over time make it cheaper because there are many people trying to improve upon each other's innovations and that's why the public private partnership is so important because the the the public will express the need they will create the need for the private sector to meet because it takes a long time to develop a product and when you do that you want to know that if it works sometimes it always works i'm not saying what you do is easy but but for me it rarely works so when i do that i want to know that if it works there is someone out there that says good we really need this we've been waiting for this thank you and and now we can actually have an exchange right so the definition of the policy the statement that this is a problem important enough to solve is basically the starting point and has been the starting point for every successful journey of improving elements of health care through the last 50 years sorry can i just quickly add something to this because i think also in light of now being here at the at the world economic forum i think issues like the women's health the gender equality just typically how they're approached is like it's the right thing to do and it's the smart thing to do right and there's business cases pretty much for every societal problem that we have and i think there's also a lot of agreement that it's the right thing to do but if we missing this element is also what needs to be done it's going to be very difficult you know to accelerate these things and i think we need to a little bit get out of this you know of this conversation between it's the right and it's the smart thing that's also needed but if we miss that one other element i think it will be very difficult as we have seen with other societal problems to move the needle and if i may add 2024 it's a very special year and i'm really glad that this initiative started you know to get to a more solid place this year simply because this year we have the most number of elections happening politicians that can ultimately bring big impact by putting certain regulations certain supports and initiatives whatever it needs to be done and i hope for the next three to six months we can really maximize to educate these politicians so they put into their policies and their plans going forward because when they before they get elected they usually often commit to things and then they're accountable to some extent hopefully deliver those things after election is harder to get their attentions so i hope this platform really accelerate that kind of education as well very simply closing us out i think we need to stop seeing it as a problem and it's more of an opportunity if we have a healthy 52 percent of the population we're going to have a much better chance at solving the climate crisis we're going to have a much better opportunity and making sure that we transition our economies in our world to be AI enabled so let's stop seeing it as a problem that we need to solve and let's think about the opportunity that having 52 percent of the population being treated equitably in the healthcare system with good outcomes what can that unlock for all of us and just some closing thoughts i think everybody you've heard it from everyone that is time for specificity and it's time for action so i'm really encouraged that we have a framework that we can go off and employ now we have metrics that we can apply and we have this growing community now where we're going to be able to share what everybody's doing because everybody has a responsibility we're going to have an a space for experimentation together to Sahel's point and we're also going to be able to create just those non-traditional partnerships that probably will move us further and faster that we would have done if everybody had been working on their own well i would like to thank you my panelists um for coming on stage to really share this pivotal moment um in the industry really closing trying to close the gap um on woman's health and to our audience i'm here in the room and online thank you for joining thank you