Insights extracted from a panel discussion at PTMC – Portugal Medical Cannabis on September 10, 2026. Panellists: Sandra Carrillo (ASOMEDCCAM), Shabnam Sarshar (The Recalibration), Carola Pérez (We, The Patients) and Leah Fletcher (Dunbar Pharma). Moderated by Heidi Whitman (EmpowHer Cannabis Society). Event photo credits: Renato Velasco
The Trillion-Dollar Gap Nobody Prices In
In a panel titled “Women’s Health and Wellness Economics in Medicinal Cannabis” at PTMC (Portugal Medical Cannabis) 2026, moderator Heidi Whitman opened with an economic argument rather than a medical one.
Heidi is chairwoman and co-founder of EmpowHer Cannabis Society, a professional network for women in cannabis that she told the room now spans 43 countries and over 1,000 members. Her framing was blunt: women keep businesses, families, healthcare systems, and communities functioning every day, often while silently managing pain, and that isn’t a failure of commitment, it’s the result of a healthcare system that has historically under-recognised female-specific conditions.
The number she asked the room to hold in mind for the rest of the panel came from the McKinsey Health Institute’s research on the global women’s health gap, which estimates that closing it could unlock roughly $1 trillion a year in global GDP by 2040, through fewer health conditions, fewer early deaths, and greater workforce participation. Against that backdrop, the panel brought together four women covering almost the entire chain from bench to bedside to boardroom: a clinician and medical educator across Latin America, a formulator working at the intersection of cannabinoid science and female physiology, a patient advocate running a pan-European patient coalition, and the CEO of a pharmaceutical manufacturer.
Their shared argument was not that cannabis is a cure-all for every female-specific condition. It was narrower and, in some ways, more uncomfortable: that an industry sitting on real-world evidence, motivated formulators, and an increasingly receptive regulatory environment is still treating women’s health as an afterthought, at exactly the moment the economic case for doing otherwise has never been clearer.
The Numbers Behind the Panel
This panel leaned harder on hard data than most, and the figures largely check out against independent sources:
- Closing the global women’s health gap could unlock roughly $1 trillion a year in GDP by 2040, according to the McKinsey Health Institute, the figure Whitman used to frame the entire panel. Today, only around 1% of global healthcare funding goes to female-specific conditions beyond oncology, and under 2% of private healthcare capital reaches endometriosis, menopause, and PCOS specifically.
- In the UK alone, 148.8 million working days were lost to sickness or injury in 2025, with a sickness absence rate of 2.4% for women against 1.7% for men, exactly the split Whitman cited. Her own research adds a further layer on top: for every day a woman is formally recorded absent, roughly 14 more are spent present but not productive, adding up to an estimated 57.5 days of presenteeism a year against just four days of recorded absence.
- Shabnam Sarshar, founder of The Recalibration, pointed to a stark research gap: perimenopause, a transition every woman goes through, has around 1,300 indexed studies, while erectile dysfunction, which affects roughly 40% of men, has around 17,000.
- Citing Germany’s national health reporting, Sarshar noted that 54% of reimbursed medical cannabis prescriptions in the country go to women, yet women were also disproportionately likely to discontinue treatment, largely due to side effects and dosing that isn’t optimised for female physiology.
- Carola Pérez, director of We, The Patients and founder of the Spanish patient association Dosemociones, shared six years of patient-collected data: 70% of patients returned to work after treatment, and 80% reported a reduction in their overall medication load, in a patient base that is 70% female, aged 35 to 95.
- Sandra Carrillo, president of ASOMEDCCAM, pointed to UK real-world evidence work from Drug Science’s Project Twenty21 as a model for the kind of large-scale, real-world data the industry needs to build alongside traditional randomised controlled trials.
5 Key Takeaways
- The women’s health gap in cannabis is an economic argument, not just a fairness one. With McKinsey pricing the global women’s health gap at roughly $1 trillion a year in lost GDP by 2040, and UK sickness absence data showing women losing far more productive days than men, the panel’s core pitch to industry and investors was financial, not just moral: this is underpriced risk and unrealised return sitting in plain sight.
- Female-specific conditions are structurally understudied, not just under-treated. The gap between roughly 1,300 indexed studies on perimenopause and 17,000 on erectile dysfunction is not a coincidence of interest, the panel argued, but the direct result of a century of research funding and clinical trial design built around male physiology by default.
- Dosing “for women” has to track hormonal cycles, not just gender. Because the endocannabinoid system interacts directly with oestrogen, panellists argued that a single fixed dose can work for a woman one month and fail the next, particularly through the volatility of perimenopause, meaning cannabinoid product design needs built-in flexibility rather than a one-size-fits-all formulation.
- Patients are already doing the real-world evidence work the industry hasn’t funded. Carola Pérez’s patient association has been collecting structured outcome data, on medication reduction, return to work, and quality of life, for six years without waiting for institutional research budgets, precisely the kind of real-world evidence the panel said regulators and prescribers still need more of.
- Employers, not just regulators, are the next lever for closing the gap. Whitman argued the industry should be pushing confidential women’s health and wellness programmes into workplaces now, treating employee benefits as a channel for medical cannabis access, rather than waiting solely on healthcare systems and regulators to move first.
Bemerkenswerte Zitate aus dem Panel
"There's a trillion dollar gap. That is the scale of what could happen if we, as an industry, start taking all of what medicine has been and utilising it properly for everybody."
"Patients need, especially female patients, we cannot be an afterthought in any regulatory decision-making or products that this industry chooses to build. We want medicine that serves a population. It has to be built with them and not just for them."
"In using the cannabinoid therapies, I can see how many patients improve the quality of life. This word, quality of life, is underestimated, because people talk about migraine, headaches, endometriosis or fibromyalgia, but when you add up all the tasks that we have, cannabinoid medicine improves not just the symptoms but the quality of life of those patients."
"With medical cannabis, we can target a lot of different symptoms with just one medication, so we help the patient with fewer side effects, and the burden of the cost for the healthcare system is better because we reduce the polypharmacy. It costs less to the government, and for the patients, it's better."
"For perimenopause, when you look at the clinical studies, we have 1,300 index studies. And when we look at erectile dysfunction, which only 40% of men may get, we have 17,000 studies. And every woman goes through the perimenopause transition."
"We are not talking about woman-washing. We are not talking about, 'Okay, here is the list of my product, what can I do with that?' No. Really designing product with care to woman, that's what we miss."
"I think they need to listen. I think they need to listen to us, to our experience, because some of the things we are saying as patients, the science confirms later when they do the trials."
"I think they need to listen. I think they need to listen to us, to our experience, because some of the things we are saying as patients, the science confirms later when they do the trials."
"There's no point as an industry in expecting to have pharmaceutical margins without pharmaceutical discipline. Eventually, that's what gets you full access to a market, is that discipline."
"What they tend to forget is that women are consumers. We're the ones that go to the pharmacy. We will go to the doctor more often. They will get a return on investment. The risk may be higher in relation to trying to follow a moving target that is women's health, but the return on investment is there."
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