Undervalued to Unavoidable: Women’s Health as Infrastructure

The investment case and playbook for treating women's health as infrastructure

The global economy loses nearly $1 trillion annually because women's health has been treated as a moral issue to fund after more urgent priorities, a niche market with limited upside, a cause to support rather than infrastructure to invest in. That framing error shapes everything downstream: research agendas, product pipelines, capital allocation, workforce policy, and the performance of organizations that have never thought to connect their decisions to it.

Every major book on women's health has diagnosed this problem. Undervalued to Unavoidable does something none of them do. It gives decision-makers the tools to act on it.

The book moves through three parts. The first establishes the economic foundation—the structural reasons the gap persists and the data that makes this a business argument, not a values one. The second maps what organizations making real progress have in common and what failure patterns look like across sectors and geographies. The third is operational: what to do, by role and by leverage point, because the CHRO's decisions are different from the investor's, which are different from the operator's.

Marissa Fayer has spent 25 years operating inside the systems this book is about. This is the playbook she kept wishing someone had written.