The saying that “health is wealth” has particular meaning for entrepreneur Carolee Lee, who created the Greenwich-based nonprofit WHAM (Women’s Health Access Matters) in 2020 in response to what she learned from her eponymous fashion jewelry company.
It was a transition, Lee told Westfair’s Fairfield County Business Journal, that she made quite easily. As CEO of Carolee Designs, she saw firsthand how health and caregiving challenges could adversely affect her workforce, which was 85% women. (Lee sold the company to Italian eyewear conglomerate Luxottica Group in 2001.)
A subsequent board member of numerous women’s health organizations, including the Breast Cancer Research Foundation for 20 years, she gained further insight into the relationship between women’s health and the nation’s financial health.
“Women are greatly understudied and often disproportionately affected by diseases, including lung cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s,” Lee, one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential leaders in global health for 2024, said in a statement.
Data from WHAM’s website supports her. Women are half of the workforce and 51% of the population. They make 80% of the health-care decisions and control 85% of consumer spending. Yet it wasn’t until the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Revitalization Act of 1993 that women and people of color were included in NIH studies. Still, only 7% of the NIH’s $86 million 2019 budget for the study of rheumatoid arthritis went to research focused on women, who make up 78% of those with autoimmune diseases, in which the immune system goes into overdrive, attacking otherwise healthy tissue. (This is undoubtedly related to the greater intensity with which women’s bodies react to disease. As immunologist Erica Ollmann Saphire, Ph.D., MBA, said on the WHAM website: “In response to a pathogen threat, the male immune system will launch the Army. The female immune system will launch the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and the Marines.”)
Women are also only a third of the participants in cardiovascular disease clinical trials, even though heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women, who are 50% more likely than men to die within a year of a heart attack. Similarly, nonsmoking women are more than twice as likely than nonsmoking men to get lung cancer, while 66% of Alzheimer’s sufferers are women.
“By accelerating research into sex and biological differences, we can not only improve outcomes but also reduce health-care costs and boost the economy,” Lee said, adding that investing $350 million in women’s health generates $14 billion in the economy.
To foster that goal, WHAM has dedicated itself to doubling the NIH budget for women’s health research and venture capital investment; increase diversity and opportunity for clinical trials and ensure studies offer results by sex and gender.
From 2:30 to 5 p.m. on Nov. 18, WHAM will present the virtual 2025 Edge Awards of $25,000 each to early-career researchers exploring how biological sex influences health outcomes across four key areas that have disproportionately or otherwise differently affect women – autoimmune disease, brain health, cancer and heart health.
“Too many promising research ideas go unfunded simply because they are too early-stage for traditional grantmaking,” Anula Jayasuriya, M.D., Ph.D., MBA — chief scientific officer of WHAM and chair of the WHAM Scientific Advisory Board – said on the WHAM website. “At WHAM, we believe that early investment in bold ideas — and in the brilliant minds behind them — is how we drive progress in women’s health. The WHAM Edge Awards are not just about research funding; they’re about changing the system and building a future where women’s health research is at the center.”
Lee added that the Edge Awards, a project of The WHAM Investigators Fund, is just one of the nonprofit’s initiatives, which include The WHAM Research Collaborative of experts to further research; The WHAM Investment Collaborative, bringing together multibillion-dollar funds; The WHAM Innovators’ Circle, drawing on women’s health-focused funds to blend early-stage innovation and investment strategy; and The WHAM Life Sciences Collaborative to consider biological sex in the development of products like drugs.
WHAM celebrates its fifth anniversary at time when women’s health and government funding for it are at an inflection point. The Trump Administration has ended the majority of USAID’s women’s health initiatives, particularly related to reproductive health and family planning. USAID’s HIV programs have also been severely cut, affecting women around the world, where AIDS is mainly a heterosexual disease.
Closer to home, there have been challenges to reproductive rights, misleading directives on the use of Tylenol in pregnancy and further confusion on vaccines, all affecting women as individuals, mothers and caregivers.
Lee finds hope, however, in the private sector and in efforts to be innovative, practical and purposeful — including her own. This year, WHAM, in collaboration with accounting firm KPMG and the KPMG Foundation, released a report “The Business Case for Accelerating Women’s Health Investment.”
“I think I’m very focused, very committed,” she added, “to creating the kind of organization that shows why ignoring women’s health is such an economic drain and what happens when we increase the funding….”
To register for the Nov. 18 WHAM Fall Forum & Edge Awards Virtual Presentation, sign up here.
