For decades, global capital markets have operated with a systematic blind spot. Not in technology. Not in energy. In women’s health.
Maryann Selfe, a Swiss-based global wealth and investment strategist and two-decade veteran of institutional capital allocation, exposes this failure in her new book “The Billion Dollar Blindspot.”
The thesis is startling: The same system that excluded half the population from clinical research created a trillion-dollar arbitrage opportunity.
Selfe’s discovery was personal. Suffering from uterine fibroids — affecting up to 80 percent of women by age 50 — she was offered a hysterectomy as the “gold standard.” Amputation presented as medicine’s best answer. That moment triggered an investor’s instinct. Where consensus is that uniform, markets are often mispriced.
The book traces how the data gap emerged. After the thalidomide disaster of the 1960s, regulators excluded pregnant women from clinical trials. That precaution expanded into a blanket exclusion of all women of “childbearing potential.”
