Founders and investors have jumped on the commercial opportunity in menopause. The midlife women’s health company Midi has reached a $1 billion valuation; the women’s health unicorn Maven has expanded into the stage of life; and celebrity-backed brands sell everything from supplements to moisturizers. Reports have estimated that menopause could be a $600 billion market.
This week, the category gained the endorsement of another major figure in women’s health: Melinda French Gates. The billionaire philanthropist announced a new $215 million commitment to women’s health, with menopause and midlife health one of three key pillars. French Gates has long funneled her philanthropy toward women’s health—especially contraceptive access and maternal health—through the Gates Foundation and her current firm Pivotal, but this is the first time she’s focusing on women’s midlife health. She has also given $100 million to Wellcome Leap, which works to catalyze women’s health research on under-funded and under-researched conditions. So far, that funding has been used to research women’s cardiovascular disease.
“As a world, we still really are not focused on these years that women go through called perimenopause and menopause. And yet those are women’s very productive years,” she told Fortune. “Their kids might be a little bit older. They might be in middle school. They might be in high school. The woman’s still working, but if she’s dealing with all these symptoms, and she goes and talks to her friends and all these providers and can’t get answers—she’s suffering and she’s losing days at work.”
