In Canada, women represent 50% of the population, nearly half of the labor workforce, and make up 75% of health care professionals. But somehow when it comes to women's health, it's considered to be a niche topic. And a January 2026 study shows that while female family doctors spend more time with their patients, they earn less. So, not only has women's health been historically underressearched, underfunded, and misunderstood, women working in health care also face additional barriers. Under the leadership of Senator Danielle Henle, a coalition of professionals in healthcare, tech, and research has come together to try to address those gaps. Senator Henle has brought forward bill S243, which sets out a national framework on women's health.

The framework understands the economic and social impact of women and women's health on the country is massive. 75% of healthcare workers are women. If you think of women as the unpaid workers in our society, caring for children, caring for their aging parents or grandparents... women continue to do more than one and a half times as much domestic unpaid labor as their partners do. And they pay a price for it. Economically women who are going through at the same time all of this is happening going through a menopause transition... what we see is women backing away from opportunities... stepping back because they have so many other responsibilities. It means actually they're going to be taking a reduction in pay in their peak earning years, which is going to impact their lifetime earnings and their pension. Poverty in older women is a real issue in Canada. And we can see that women actually live more of their years in a state of poor health than do men. And that gap between how long we live and how long we live in good health is actually growing.

Bill S243 is a framework for accountability and a national framework around women's health. It asks for a broader definition of women's health that is more comprehensive. It asks for accountability and measurement and it asks for us to look at global issues as well in equity issues, social issues. The determinance of health and the impact of health more broadly. Canada, we are behind in having one. And our women's health is fragmented because we have 13 different health jurisdictions. Women don't differ very much between provinces, but the care they have access to sure does. It needn't [compete with provinces]. All it needs to do is outline... these are the things that you have to be measuring. This is best practice. This is a standard that you should be aspiring to. For too long, we've defined women's health by being around reproductive outcomes... but we didn't talk about migraines, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders. We also need to think about economic health and well-being... all of these things are bound together. You can't separate them out and say, "Okay, health is access to a doctor."

A woman may not present with the classical symptoms that we think of a man as having that heavy compression on the chest... A woman may present with something that sounds more like heartburn. But we also experience as women unfortunately that dismissal of a symptom. [Personal experience]: going into to be assessed at night when I was having my first asthma attack... greeted by a doctor who knew me... saying, "Jen, you always seem like a pretty happy person. Are you having a fight with your boyfriend or something?" I couldn't breathe. I had asthma. My mind is blown because it's like a different version of it's all in your head, right? He was someone who would have called on me for my opinion and my expertise... and you feel so dismissed. It was not a good moment.

Research shows that it can take up to 27 years to determine whether a medication is safe to use during pregnancy. More than 80% of prescription drugs approved in Canada over the past two decades have been found to lack adequate safety data in pregnancy. Yet roughly 80% to 90% of pregnant women take at least one medication. If you're doing a drug study... and a woman falls pregnant, she's automatically then excluded. At the very least, you'd think you would keep track of her and the baby's health. Epigenetic changes is one of the big learnings... the maternal environment has profound impacts on the future health of a baby. It's a transmissible impact. In Scandinavia, they have national reporting of prescriptions... you can then link that to their birth outcome data and pediatric outcome data. You don't protect women from research, you protect women through research.

What's worrying me most is the motivation behind some of the work that gets in social media. There is an incentive... to provide some emotional anger and irritation which gets people galvanized. That harbors mistrust which is a problem then as a physician when you've got someone who's been told by their social media celebrity influencer not to trust your doctor. That gives you an immediate barrier to setting up a therapeutic relationship. There's usually a grain of truth... but sometimes only a grain. They don't sell well the complexity on the internet, but it is the kind of complexity that people bring to the table. Women just don't know where to turn for the answers. Why should a medication be available to a woman if she lives in BC but not if she lives in Ontario? A national framework that says here's what the evidence says... it shouldn't be that we have to see women treated differently based on which province they live in.