The European Parliament has backed a new report that includes calls for dedicated women’s health funding within the EU’s next major research and innovation programmes, as negotiations over Europe’s 2028–34 budget take shape.
MEPs adopted the report on gender inequalities in health on 16 September, calling on the European Commission to prioritise earmarked funding for women’s health research under the next Horizon Europe programme, known as FP10, and the proposed European Competitiveness Fund.
The report, led by Irish MEP Billy Kelleher, also calls for greater consideration of sex and gender in medical research, better representation of women in clinical trials and improved collection of sex-disaggregated health data.
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The funding recommendation is particularly significant and timely as the EU determines its spending priorities for the next seven-year budget cycle.
The European Commission has proposed a €175 billion budget for Horizon Europe for 2028–34 to support innovation and research. Alongside it, the proposed European Competitiveness Fund is intended to support strategic technologies and companies from research through to commercialisation and scale, with health and biotech among its priority areas.
Parliament’s report calls for women’s health to be explicitly prioritised within these future funding programmes, rather than relying solely on broader health and life sciences funding.
It marks the latest development in a growing push for a more coordinated European approach to women’s health.
In September 2025, we reported that the European Policy Centre called for a dedicated EU Women’s Health Strategy, arguing that fragmented national approaches were limiting progress in research, healthcare and innovation.
Earlier this year, a coalition of more than 50 organisations took that push a step further, presenting a detailed blueprint for a future EU Women’s Health Strategy at the European Parliament. The proposals included aligning women’s health with future EU funding frameworks and the next Multiannual Financial Framework.
The latest report moves the issue further into the EU’s institutional agenda, with Parliament itself now formally backing greater investment.
However, the vote does not itself create a dedicated women’s health fund or allocate money as the report is non-binding. The details of the EU’s next long-term budget and research programmes will be negotiated between European institutions.
For women’s health, attention will now turn to whether Parliament’s recommendations translate into dedicated funding as Europe’s next research and innovation budgets are agreed.
The non-binding status feels like the crucial detail here. Earmarking women's health in FP10 could change which questions become researchable, but the real test will be whether sex-disaggregated data and trial representation are built into funding conditions rather than left as aspirations.
Interesting to look at the same gap in the US! Women's health research took 8.8 per cent of all NIH research grant funding across the decade to 2023. By 2023 alone that had fallen to 7.9 per cent while the overall budget rose. Earmarking is a great to see, but the report being non-binding means we'll need to see whether it survives the 2028 to 2034 negotiations. Of its asks, sex-disaggregated data would change the most, because without it nobody can see whether the funding is working!