Source page: McKinsey & Company
Commentary
A shortfall in addressing women's health
Women's health | Inequality
February 23, 2024 – A lack of data specific to sex and gender has safety implications for women, according to the McKinsey Health Institute. Senior partner Lucy Pérez and coauthors find that since 1980, drugs are 3.5 times more likely to be withdrawn from the global market due to safety risks for women as compared with men. Further, a systematic lack of disease understanding contributes to the women’s health gap in terms of disability-adjusted life years.
To read the report, see “Closing the women’s health gap: A $1 trillion opportunity to improve lives and economies,” January 17, 2024.
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Visual form
Categorical bar chart.
Layout / body structure
The page uses one central set of four bars, with a large explanatory callout on the left and the category labels running under each bar.
What is being compared
It compares global drug withdrawals attributed to men’s health risk, women’s health risk, non-sex- or gender-specific risk, and cases with insufficient data from 1980 to 2023.
Measurement system
The measure is the number of withdrawals, and the left-hand callout translates the comparison into a 3.5x difference between women’s and men’s health-risk withdrawals.
Visible structure inside the graphic
Four vertical bars sit on a shared baseline, each bar is labeled with its count, and an arrowed callout links the men’s and women’s bars to the 3.5x message.
Main takeaway from the visual
Withdrawals tied to women’s health risk clearly outnumber withdrawals tied to men’s health risk, and a large residual block also remains in the insufficient-data category.
Key standout values or extremes
Women’s health risk and non-sex- or gender-specific risk are both at 21, men’s health risk is 6, insufficient data is 25, and the callout states that withdrawals occur 3.5 times more often in women than men.
Controls / sequence, when applicable
This is a static chart image with no in-chart controls to operate.
Companion media, when applicable
There is no separate companion audio or video; the chart image is the full visual on this page.