I think my personal opinion and recommendation is to have protected ring-fenced funding for women's health in general, and for the research, because when you protect the funding for research in a specific area, multidisciplinary researchers will write the grants and do the research in that particular area. If we leave it open to saying.... Right now in the federal grants, there's a lot of attention paid to sex- and gender-based analysis, which is fantastic and laudatory, and they'll tell you that 90% of their grants are doing this, but they've analyzed a mandatory box that we all have to fill out.
We actually analyzed what they said they were going to do, and that's when we found that only.... If you exclude female breast cancer, I think it's 4.4% of federal grants that are going towards women's health questions. I can't tell you all of it. I can just tell you my experience: that it is very undervalued. Part of the reason why I wanted to start the women's health cluster was to empower researchers to do this kind of work. I have heard from women's health researchers that they don't want to call themselves “women's health researchers”, because they feel it's undervalued.
As I said, I get questions. One of the things we do in my lab is postpartum depression research, and I've been told multiple times in trying to publish it or trying to get grants that this isn't important research, even though we know that in a person's lifetime it is the time of greatest risk to develop depression.
I think ring-fenced funding, like ALS and the ice bucket challenge.... Another one is HIV/AIDS. There was lots of money, which the Canadian government gave worldwide, and it went from a death sentence to people being able to live with the infection now.
That's the solution to me. That's our compass and map.