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Health Systems and Equity

Women's Health Through 2035: Evidence-Backed Priorities, Not Predictions

11 min readEvidence synthesis
Read the evidence

The question in focus

A measurable agenda for women's health through 2035 grounded in WHO targets, research-gap reviews and life-course care rather than speculative forecasts.

Evidence at a glance

77.1%

women aged 15 to 49 whose family-planning needs were met by modern methods in 2024

WHO reported only a small increase from 76.5% in 2015, demonstrating stalled progress rather than forecasting future coverage. [1]

Health in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

Start with outcomes the world has already agreed to measure

A credible 2035 agenda should extend unfinished work rather than predict which technology will dominate. Existing WHO and Sustainable Development Goal frameworks call for lower maternal mortality, universal sexual and reproductive health services, reduced premature mortality from noncommunicable disease, stronger mental health and universal health coverage. [2] These are accountable outcomes with known indicators.

Recent WHO monitoring shows progress is uneven. Family-planning coverage has barely moved, and the decline in premature mortality from major noncommunicable diseases has slowed. [1] The priority is therefore implementation: reliable primary care, affordable medicines, referral pathways, respectful maternity care and data systems that reveal who is being missed.

  • Publish outcomes by sex, age, geography and relevant social factors.
  • Measure access, quality, safety and experience together.
  • Report service continuity, not one-time campaign reach.
  • Track financial hardship alongside clinical outcomes.

Protect sexual, reproductive and maternal health across settings

Contraception, fertility care, safe pregnancy, abortion care where lawful, infection prevention and treatment, and freedom from violence remain central to women's health. WHO's global strategy places survival, thriving and transformation within a rights-based, multisector framework through 2030. [3] Extending that work to 2035 requires resilient services in routine care, emergencies and migration settings.

Maternal outcome improvement cannot end at discharge. Hypertensive disorders, gestational diabetes, perinatal mental illness and severe maternal morbidity can signal longer-term risk. Health records and referral systems should carry pregnancy history into primary and specialty care so a short episode becomes a life-course prevention opportunity rather than a forgotten event.

  • Connect antenatal, delivery, postpartum and primary care records.
  • Provide rapid escalation for obstetric warning signs.
  • Include contraception and fertility goals in shared decisions.
  • Measure respectful care and avoidable treatment delay.

Move beyond a reproductive-only definition

WHO explicitly frames women's health beyond sexual and reproductive care. Cardiovascular disease, cancer, mental illness, autoimmune disease, neurological conditions and musculoskeletal health may affect women differently or be recognized later. [4] A life-course system should join prevention, symptom recognition and chronic-condition management rather than create a separate women's clinic for every diagnosis.

Menstrual disorders, endometriosis, fibroids, pelvic pain, menopause and sexual health still require dedicated expertise because evidence and access gaps remain. The objective is not to isolate these conditions. It is to make them visible within primary care, diagnostics, benefits design, clinical trials and specialist networks while maintaining clear referral standards.

  • Include reproductive history in cardiovascular and bone assessment.
  • Treat mental health as part of every life stage.
  • Build routes for complex pelvic and sexual pain.
  • Support healthy ageing beyond menopause symptoms.

Close evidence gaps by changing research infrastructure

The NIH 2024 to 2028 strategy prioritizes research across the life course, integration of sex and gender influences, inclusion and data science. [5] The National Academies concluded that a comprehensive women's-health research agenda needs stronger oversight, infrastructure and prioritization across conditions that are unique to, more common in or different in women. [6]

By 2035, success should mean more than enrolling women. Trials should be powered to examine clinically relevant sex differences, include pregnancy and older age when scientifically appropriate, report race and ethnicity carefully, and publish adverse events and negative findings. Evidence synthesis should flag when recommendations rely on indirect or low-certainty evidence.

  • Require sex-disaggregated analysis where biologically and clinically relevant.
  • Include patient-prioritized outcomes and quality of life.
  • Improve pregnancy, lactation and menopause evidence.
  • Fund implementation research, not discovery alone.

Use technology to extend care, with clinical and rights safeguards

Digital records, remote monitoring, decision support and telehealth can reduce fragmentation, especially when specialists are scarce. They can also amplify inequity, false reassurance or surveillance if products are trained on narrow populations, deployed without workflow support or collect intimate data without meaningful consent. Technology should be judged against a defined care gap and patient-important outcome. [5][6]

Procurement should require clinical validation, subgroup performance, cybersecurity, data minimization, accessibility and a pathway for human review. An algorithm that increases referrals without adding diagnostic capacity can lengthen queues. A dashboard that does not change a decision is documentation, not transformation. Digital quality therefore belongs inside clinical governance, not beside it. [5][6]

  • State the decision and accountable clinical owner.
  • Audit performance after deployment.
  • Provide a non-digital route to the same care.
  • Measure whether technology narrows or widens gaps.

A 2035 scorecard should be public and hard to game

A useful scorecard combines population outcomes with process and equity measures. Examples include maternal mortality and severe morbidity, modern contraceptive need met, time to diagnosis for selected chronic conditions, control of blood pressure and diabetes, access to perinatal mental-health care, research inclusion and patient-reported function. Each indicator needs a denominator, data-quality note and responsible institution. [1][2][3][5]

Targets should be locally set from baselines and reviewed with patients, clinicians and public-health leaders. When evidence is uncertain, the scorecard should measure learning, such as completion of pragmatic trials or improvement in diagnostic data, rather than invent a clinical target. The central discipline is transparent progress on established needs, not a confident story about an unknowable future. [5][6]

  • Name the baseline, target and measurement interval.
  • Publish missingness and subgroup uncertainty.
  • Pair outcomes with patient experience and safety.
  • Retire metrics that do not guide action.

What the evidence cannot yet answer

  • Global targets do not determine the correct intervention mix for every country or health system.
  • Many women's-health datasets have incomplete sex, gender, ethnicity, disability and socioeconomic information.
  • Observed associations between sex, gender and health outcomes do not by themselves identify a biological or social mechanism.
  • The 2035 framing is a planning horizon. This brief does not claim to predict disease burden, technology adoption or policy.

Questions worth taking into care

  1. Which measurable health gap are we trying to close?
  2. What baseline and subgroup data are trustworthy enough to guide action?
  3. Does the proposed service connect reproductive, mental and chronic care?
  4. How will patients participate in governance and priority setting?
  5. What evidence would make us stop, adapt or expand the intervention?

Source record

Evidence used in this review

Sources were selected for clinical authority, methodological relevance and traceability. Links open the original guidance, public-health record or research publication.

  1. [1]
  2. [2]
    Targets of Sustainable Development Goal 3

    World Health Organization · 2025

  3. [3]
  4. [4]
    Women's Health

    World Health Organization · 2026

  5. [5]
    NIH-Wide Strategic Plan for Research on the Health of Women 2024-2028

    NIH Office of Research on Women's Health · 2024

  6. [6]
    A New Vision for Women's Health Research

    National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine · 2024

Editorial standard

This evidence synthesis is for general information. It does not diagnose a condition or replace care from a qualified health professional. Treatment choices depend on individual history, examination, local guidance and informed preference. Emergency or rapidly worsening symptoms need urgent local medical assessment.