Menopause Underfunded And Overlooked: Not Anymore

My inbox lit up last Thursday. Women I’ve known for years, some I’ve never met, forwarding me the same news with the same energy: hey, someone finally gets it. Melinda French Gates had just pledged $215 million to women’s health. Contraceptive access, maternal care, and yes, menopause. A $10 million chunk goes directly to the Menopause Society to train healthcare providers and expand access to care across the country.

I’ve been doing this work for nine years. Not writing about the problem from a distance. Hunting down the women who were already hacking midlife before anyone in power thought it mattered — the researchers, the clinicians, the thought leaders already helping any woman they could reach. They existed. They’d been out there the whole time. And after nine years of being privy to hundreds of women’s experiences, the throughline is impossible to miss: we are invisible. The goods and services we need don’t exist or aren’t reaching us. We are half the world and we have been treated like a footnote. Nine years of knowing the answers existed somewhere. Just not where medicine was looking.

So yeah. I felt something.

She Said the Quiet Part Out Loud

Here’s what got me about how French Gates framed it. She told the Associated Press that philanthropy’s job is to “shine light on societal problems that have been left behind” and signal to government and other donors that something matters. She’s not trying to solve this herself. She’s trying to make the problem too loud to ignore.

Good. Because it has been quiet for way too long.

Consider the math. The NIH operates on a roughly $47 billion annual budget. For the entirety of its existence, menopause didn’t even have a research category. Not a small one. Not an underfunded one. No category at all. Then 2023 arrives and we finally get a line item. A whopping $56 million. Less than one-tenth of one percent of the total budget for the health transition that every woman who lives long enough will experience.

We are half the fucking world and we got $56 million.

I genuinely don’t know how to hold that information without getting a little loud about it.

What $56 Million Actually Looks Like

Let me give you some context for that number. The NIH’s cancer research arm alone received $7.2 billion in 2023. Which, yes, cancer deserves every dollar. I’m not arguing against that. I’m asking why the life stage that affects every woman who lives long enough is treated like a niche concern.

Menopause is not a niche. It is not a special interest. It is biology, happening on schedule, to half the population. It affects cardiovascular health, bone density, cognitive function, mental health, sleep, metabolism, and sexual health. It influences how women perform at work, how they show up in relationships, how they make decisions about their bodies for the next thirty or forty years of their lives.

Thirty to forty years. We’re not talking about a rough patch. We’re talking about a third of a woman’s life.

And we got $56 million to figure it out.

Two Forces, One Meeting Point

Here’s the part that actually moves me about this moment, and I’ve been thinking about it since Thursday.

Women like Melinda French Gates are showing up at the top. Writing checks that force institutions to pay attention. Using access and money and platform to say, loudly, in rooms where it counts: this is important. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, exactly what power is supposed to be for.

And then there are the Kuel Lifes of the world.

Menopause Underfunded And Overlooked: Women Build Their Own Table

I built Kuel Life because I couldn’t find the conversation I needed. Turns out I wasn’t the only one looking. Women showed up because the alternative was silence–no honest accounting of what midlife actually felt like, no space that wasn’t pink-washed or soft-focused into something decorative. We built it from the ground up. No famous last name attached. Just women, finding each other, refusing to disappear.

That’s the grassroots end of this. Women who got tired of being dismissed and started doing their own research. Who found each other in comment sections and DMs and group chats and decided that if the system wasn’t going to help them, they’d help each other. No funding. No category. No line item. Just determination and a WiFi connection.

Those two forces are not competing. They never were. French Gates is right that philanthropy needs to crowd in government funding. But government funding also gets crowded in by constituent noise. By the accumulating weight of women who have stopped accepting “that’s just menopause” as a clinical response.

The top-down meets the bottom-up. That’s how systems actually change.

Don’t Confuse the Gold Rush With the Revolution

I know there are people who think this moment will get commercialized into something unrecognizable. Honestly? I’ve written about that exact problem. The menopause product overwhelm is real, and it is absolutely selling women doubt instead of answers. But that’s a problem with the market, not with the movement. You can’t unring that bell.

The women who are 55 today grew up watching their mothers disappear into middle age without a word. When symptoms got loud enough, the answer was a hysterectomy. One in three women had one before they turned 60. My mother was one of them. She thought she’d avoided menopause. She hadn’t. She’d just gotten a surgical version of it with no warning and no follow-up. The message was clear: this part of your body is a problem to be removed, not a transition to be understood. Their daughters were watching. And when they got here themselves, they said: no.

Not quietly. Not politely. Not with a graceful head tilt and a soft smile.

No.

They found each other online and started demanding answers. They funded documentaries, wrote books that became bestsellers, built platforms, and showed up on Capitol Hill. And now one of the most powerful philanthropists in the world is writing a nine-figure check and saying, in the Associated Press, that this is a problem “neglected for far too long.” She’s not wrong. Nature said it plainly, too: menopause research is globally underfunded.

She’s not wrong. But she didn’t arrive in a vacuum. The noise was already there. She just turned up the volume.

And if you want to understand the deeper history of how medicine has treated women’s bodies, we’ve written about medical misogyny and menopause before. It runs deeper than one funding line item.

This Is Everyone’s Problem

I want to say one more thing before I close, because it needs to be said clearly.

This is not a women-only issue in the sense of a side conversation, a thing for women to sort out among themselves while the serious business of the world continues.

A healthy, functional population is in everyone’s interest. Women in midlife are in their peak earning years. They are leading organizations, raising families, caring for aging parents, driving economies. When they are underserved by medicine, undertreated for manageable symptoms, left without accurate information about their own bodies, that has consequences that reach well beyond the individual woman.

We are not asking for special treatment. We are asking to be treated like half the world.

$56 million is what our health was worth to them.

The meeting in the middle, the Melinda French Gateses coming down from the top, and the women like us pushing up from the ground, says we’re done accepting that answer.

Sources:

1. Melinda French Gates $215 million pledge, AP interview, menopause funding:
   ABC News, “Melinda French Gates donates $215 million to improve women’s health worldwide,” June 2026.
   abcnews.go.com
2. $10 million to the Menopause Society:
   Pivotal, “Melinda French Gates Expands Her Work in Women’s Health,” June 2026.
   pivotal.com
3. NIH annual budget (~$47 billion):
   NIH Office of Budget.
   nih.gov
4. NIH menopause research category established in 2023, $56 million allocated:
   Nature, “Menopause research is globally underfunded. It’s time to change that,” January 2025.
   nature.com
   Confirmed by U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas press release, December 2025.
   salinas.house.gov
5. NCI fiscal year 2023 budget ($7.2 billion):
   NCI Budget Fact Book 2024.
   cancer.gov
6. Hysterectomy rates peaked at 10.6 per 1,000 women by 1975:
   Historical and Projected Hysterectomy Rates in the USA, PMC, 2020.
   pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
7. One in three women had a hysterectomy before age 60; two-thirds potentially unnecessary:
   CNN Health, “Experts: Two-thirds of hysterectomies unnecessary,” 2008.
   cnn.com
8. Halle Berry, Capitol Hill, bipartisan Advancing Menopause and Midlife Women’s Health Care Act:
   The Hill, May 2024.
   thehill.com
   Washington Post, May 2024.
   washingtonpost.com
9. OB/GYN residency programs: 92.9% agree standardized curriculum needed, only 31% have one:
   Augusta University / Menopause journal study, February 2024.
   magazines.augusta.edu

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