“This is feminist economic policy in action.”

Chrystia Freeland, Canadian Deputy PM, Minister of Finance (Budget 2022)

Investigations into the way that government’s allocate money into health research is important, because taxpayers should know how their money is being used and if that use aligns with broader societal interest and medical need.

At The Nuzzo Letter, I have previously shown that substantial differences exist in funding of men’s and women’s health research in Australia and the United States (U.S.). In Australia, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) invests about five times more money into women’s than men’s health research (graph below).

In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health (NIH) invests about 14% of its annual research budget into women’s health and 6% of its annual research budget into men’s health (graph below).

Obtaining the funding data from Australia was not difficult, as the NHMRC publishes these data openly on its website in a small table. Obtaining the funding data from the U.S. was more cumbersome, as it required downloading annual reports published by the Office of Research on Women’s Health and extracting and organizing the relevant data. Nevertheless, so long as one was aware of the Office’s reports and where to find them, graphing the data was still possible. Canada is a different story.

Canadian Institutes of Health Research

Canada’s main government funding body for health research is the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. This government agency was established in 2000 and is similar to the NHMRC in Australia and the NIH in the U.S. It consists of 13 institutes that operate separate from Health Canada. One of the institutes is the Institute of Gender and Health. This institute is the Canadian equivalent of the NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health in the U.S.

Here, my aim was to identify, extract, and summarize data from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to explore whether the sex differences in health research funding that exist in the U.S and Australia also exist in Canada. However, in pursing this aim, I was unable to find annual reports from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research where financial allocations for men’s and women’s health research are itemized. Consequently, I was unable to generate a graph similar to those that I have created for the U.S. and Australia. Instead, to get a general sense of such funding allocations, I had to rely on a hodgepodge of spreadsheets, reports, and press releases scattered across websites of various agencies within the Canadian government.

The National Women’s Health Research Initiative (NHWRI)

Women and Gender Equality Canada (WAGE) is a department in the Canadian government and is separate from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. However, in 2021, WAGE and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research joined forces to create the National Women's Health Research Initiative (NWHRI).

According to the Canadian government, the aim of the Initiative is to “advance a coordinated research program that addresses under-researched and high-priority areas of women's health and to ensure new evidence improves women's, girls’, and gender-diverse people's care and health outcomes.”

In 2021, the Canadian government announced it would invest $20 million over five years into the Initiative.

The Initiative is composed of two funding streams. The first is the Pan-Canadian Women's Health Coalition, which has been described by the Canadian government as “virtual hubs across Canada linked through an overarching coordinating centre.” In October 2022, the Canadian government announced that $8.4 million was available for 10 grants that would create the Coalition. To receive one of these grants, applicants were required to incorporate the following themes into the hub’s activities: engagement of women with lived or living experience; inclusion of indigenous peoples; inclusion of the concepts equity, diversity, and inclusion; and inclusion of sex- and gender-based analysis. Ten hubs were subsequently created from these grants, and the projects undertaken by each hub are now listed online.

In June 2023, another funding opportunity for one grant of up to $1.2 million was announced to create the Coordinating Centre that “together with hubs will work to mobilize new and existing knowledge in women's health into effective, gender-sensitive, and culturally appropriate women's health services across Canada.” This additional funding helped to finish the overall aim of the Coalition, which was to create a central source of scientific and clinical information regarding the latest developments in women’s health (but not men’s health).

The second part of the National Women’s Health Research Initiative is the Innovation Fund. The Innovation Fund is split into Discovery Grants and Operating Grants. Discovery Grants support “biomedical research by teams proposing bold and innovative research questions in women's health.” Operating Grants support areas of women’s health such as translational research in healthcare diagnostics, therapeutics, and devices and healthcare implementation research to remove barriers to access to healthcare.

Calls for up to 13 Discovery Grants totalling $2 million were announced as were 15 Operating Grants totalling $9 million. A total of 24 projects were awarded at an expense to taxpayers of $13.7 million. General themes of the funded research included reproductive care and pregnancy, polycystic ovary syndrome, endometriosis, cancer and HPV, heart health, mental health, eating disorders, and “gender-based violence.”

WAGE as a Solo Actor

In addition to partial funding of the National Women’s Health Research Initiative, WAGE also invests a significant amount of taxpayer money into other initiatives and programs aimed at improving the well-being of girls and women. A spreadsheet on the government’s website lists all the grants funded by WAGE between 2017 and 2024. As shown in the graph below, grants from WAGE amounted to $1.7 billion over this eight-year period, with annual funds ranging from about $1 million in 2017 to nearly $700 million in 2023.

Text analysis of WAGE’s spreadsheet reveals that the vast majority of the approximate 2,400 funded projects were designated to either women’s or LGBTQ causes. In the spreadsheet, the words “boy” and “men” appear in project titles 20 and 42 times, respectively (and not necessarily in male-positive ways). In contrast, the words “girl” and “women” appear in project titles 75 and 599 times, respectively, and the word “feminist” appears in 67 project titles, and the phrase “LGBTQ” appears in 153 project titles.

The spreadsheet also reveals three broad funding streams that the projects were aligned with. Of the projects that had funding stream information listed, 1,475 projects were associated with the “Women’s Program.” According to WAGE, the purpose of the Women’s Program is to “advance equality for women in Canada by working to address or remove systemic barriers impeding women’s progress and advancement. The [Women’s Program] supports the Government of Canada’s goal of advancing gender equality in Canada. It is consistent with Government of Canada priorities related to economic prosperity, and supports Canada’s international commitments related to gender equality.”

The next most popular funding stream, which accounted for 505 projects, was “Equality for Sex, Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression Program.” According to WAGE, the purpose of this funding stream is to “advance social, political and economic equality with respect to sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression. Advancement towards a greater understanding of the intersection of sex and gender with other identity factors that include race, national and ethnic origin, Indigenous origin or identity, age, sexual orientation, socio-economic condition, place of residence and disability are encouraged under the Program."

Finally, 308 projects were associated with the “Gender-Based Violence Program.” According to WAGE, the purpose of this program is to “strengthen the [gender-based violence] sector to address gaps in supports for two groups of survivors: 1) Indigenous women and their communities, and 2) underserved populations (including women living with a disability, non-status/refugee/immigrant women, LGBTQ2S, gender non-conforming people and ethno-cultural women) in Canada. The Program provides grant and contribution funding to Canadian organizations to improve supports to help create long-term, comprehensive solutions at the national, regional, and local levels.”

Women RISE Initiative

Another component of the Canadian government’s investment into women’s wellbeing is the Women RISE initiative. This initiative, which was established in March 2022, was formed out of partnerships between the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

According to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Women RISE Initiative is a “ground-breaking $24 million partnership to support research to improve the health and socioeconomic well-being of women, particularly those from marginalized communities, as part of supporting the global recovery from COVID-19.”

According to the government, the Initiative was created because “[a]round the world, women and girls have disproportionately suffered from the socio-economic impacts of COVID-19. Women have borne the brunt of layoffs and loss of livelihoods, sacrificed their own health at the frontlines of the pandemic response and disproportionately shouldered the burden of the additional caregiving associated with COVID-19.”

In November of 2022, the 23 recipients of the Women RISE research initiative were announced at the Canadian Conference on Global Health in Toronto. Themes of the awarded projects included infectious diseases, sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections, and pandemics and other health emergencies. According to the Canadian government, the knowledge generated from these projects will “inform immediate and medium-term solutions for post-COVID-19 recovery that will improve gender equality and health equity outcomes in low- and middle-income communities in Canada and globally.”

WAGE’s Menstrual Equity Fund Pilot

Another development in the Canadian government’s funding of women’s health in recent years has been the Menstrual Equity Fund Pilot. The Menstrual Equity Fund Pilot was created out of Budget 2022, which was “committed to establishing a national pilot for the Menstrual Equity Fund (MEF) to address the barriers related to affordability and stigma that some Canadians face when accessing menstrual products.” In Budget 2022, $25 million was allocated over two years for this fund, with further commitments to the fund projected into the future. In November 2023, the Standing Committee on the Status of Women released a report titled “Let’s Talk About it, Period: Achieving Menstrual Equity in Canada.” In the report, the Committee provided future recommendations for achieving “menstrual equity” in Canada. One of these recommendations was making the Menstrual Equity Fund Pilot a permanent feature of Canadian society, if the pilot was deemed successful.

Budget 2021 and More

One challenge in evaluating government spending on health research is where to draw the line on what is considered funding for health versus what is funding for things more indirectly linked to health. Sometimes, as was seen in the Australian federal budget of 2025-26, governments might not classify certain items as health funding, but those items might still have an obvious potential for improving quality of life. Because the Canadian Institutes of Health Research do not provide their own explicit break down of men’s and women’s health research funding, one is then left trying to piece together numbers from various government programs and websites to get some sense of sex differences in health funding. Inevitably, this leads one to include in their analysis programs that are not specifically labelled as health research funding but that are still likely to improve wellbeing.

Budget 2021, which appears to have been a critical turning point for gynocentrism in Canadian health funding, contains many such examples. In fact, Budget 2021 was labelled by the Department of Finance as: “Budget 2021: Supporting Women.”

Earlier, I mentioned that the National Women's Health Research Initiative stemmed from Budget 2021. But this is not exactly true. What the budget actually proposed was $20 million for a National Institute for Women’s Health Research. This suggests plans for a long-lasting physical presence. However, for reasons that are unclear, the Institute never materialized, and the final result of the $20 million was the National Women’s Health Research Initiative.

Budget 2021 also included the following programs for women:

* $601.3 million over five years, starting in 2021-22, to advance towards a new National Action Plan to End Gender-Based Violence

* $158.5 million over five years to the Department of National Defence and Veteran Affairs, and $29.9 million per year from ongoing funding from existing resources, to expand the Department’s work to eliminate sexual misconduct and “gender-based violence” in the military and to support survivors

* $315.4 million through the Canada Housing Benefit, to increase direct financial assistance for low-income women and children fleeing violence to help with their rent payments

* $250 million in reallocated funding to support the construction, repair, and operating costs of an estimated 560 units of transitional housing and shelter spaces for women and children fleeing violence

* $146.9 million over four years to strengthen the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy, which, since its launch in 2018, has involved $7 billion of “investments and commitments that are helping hundreds of thousands of women access the financing, networks and expertise they need to start up, scale up and expand into international markets.” Notably, the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy is comprised of the Women Entrepreneurship Loan Fund and the Women’s Enterprise Initiative. In Budget 2021, the Canadian Government committed $55 million to establish the Women Entrepreneurship Loan Fund, which provides women entrepreneurs with loans up to $50,000 to help them start or grow their business. In 2022–23, the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy helped women secure over 2,600 loans. Since 2018, the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy has provided over 25,000 total loans or non-repayable grants.

Budget 2021 was not the only Canadian federal budget to include stockpiles of cash for women. In fact, in Budget 2022, Chrystia Freeland – the Canadian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance – was quoted as saying:

“This is women’s liberation. It will mean more women no longer need to choose between motherhood and a career. And it will make life more affordable for middle class Canadian families.”

Budget 2022 included some of the following items for women:

* $539.3 million over five years to prevent “gender-based violence”

* $180 million for the Generation Equality Forum to support the economic participation and higher education of women around the world

* $31.6 million to expand the Canadian Armed Forces’ health services and physical fitness programs to be more responsive to women and gender-diverse military personnel

* $25 million for the Menstrual Equity Fund Pilot

In Budget 2023, $160 million was allocated over three years for programs that serve women and attempt to advance gender equality in Canada. And in Budget 2024, funding was allocated for leadership on women’s rights and gender equality in association with Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy.

Men’s Health

Though a search of sex-specific funding in Canada shows a clear bias in favor of funding women’s health research, the Canadian government, to their credit, has also invested some money specifically into men’s health.

In 2021, around the time that Canada was making a sharp gynocentric turn in the direction of its health funding, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research published a report on the well-being of Canadian boys and men titled, “Advancing Boys’ and Men’s Health: Outcomes From 11 Years of CIHR-IGH Funded Research.” According to the report’s introduction, in 2007, the Institute of Gender and Health instigated the Boys’ and Men’s Health Initiative to “address the urgent need to increased attention and research capacity in boys’ and men’s health. With an investment of over $15M, the initiative spanned 11 years…” Thus, the total amount of money invested into the Boys’ and Men’s Health Initiative was similar to the $13.7 million invested into the National Women's Health Research Initiative.

The report summarized the following areas of boys’ and men’s health:

* Mental health and wellness

* Violence, risk taking, and resilience

* Fertility and reproductive health

* Sport and physical activity

The report included statistics on male life expectancy, suicide, alcohol use, motor vehicle accidents, sexual abuse, HIV/AIDS, cardiovascular health, and physical activity rates. It included summaries of studies and programs that were funded under the Initiative, which were attempting to improve or better understand some of these outcomes.

The return on investment of these projects remains to be seen. Nevertheless, an explicit attempt was made by the Canadian government to generate new knowledge and programs pertaining to boys’ and men’s health, and for that, they deserve credit.

However, one should also note that, after the Initiative was completed, the Institute of Gender and Health interpreted the findings under the lens of intersectionality and social determinism. This is evident from the final paragraph of the report:

“Boys’ and men’s health is rooted in systemic and structural processes like racism, ableism, ageism, classism, discrimination, and stigma, and is shaped by social identities and positions like class, gender, geography, Indigeneity, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and additional intersecting factors. Projects in the Boys’ and Men’s Health Initiative have demonstrated that these factors are critical determinants of men’s health. Future research which applies an intersectional approach to men’s health research may further illuminate how intersecting social identity factors, positions and processes shape norms, attitudes, and practices in men’s health.”

However, one should also note that this concluding statement is largely at odds with another note in the report which states that 30% of a man’s overall health is determined by his genetics, while the other 70% is determined by his lifestyle choices. Thus, the Institute of Gender and Health lacks a clear and consistent message regarding the factors that cause or correlate with a man’s health.

Conclusion

In closing, my intention was to complete a simple project that involved extracting men’s and women’s health funding data from tables published by the Canadian government and then present these data in a precise yet basic graph. However, the project turned out to be a convoluted tour across various websites and reports to obtain only a general sense of Canada’s sex-specific research funding. From this convoluted tour, I have concluded that, in recent years, the Canadian government has invested significantly more funds into women’s than men’s health. Other than the 2021 report on the status of boys and men, which stemmed from research conducted between 2007 and 2020, the Canadian government has seemingly focused the vast majority of its sex-specific energy and money on girls and women. This includes, for example, the National Women’s Health Research Initiative, the Women RISE Initiative, the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy, all the programs associated with WAGE including the Menstrual Equity Fund Pilot, and likely a host of other programs and initiatives that I did not discoverer. This gynocentrism in Canadian health funding is perhaps of little surprise given that (a) the same trend exists in other western countries, (b) Justin Trudeau – the Canadian Prime Minister from 2015 to 2025 – is well known for his feminism, and (c) many academic articles thrown into the Rubbish Bin at The Nuzzo Letter over the past couple of years have been written by feminist academics who work at universities in Canada.

Finally, to encapsulate the current state of gynocentrism in health funding in Canada and other western countries, I would now like to reveal one additional discovery that I made in this search for information on health funding. This discovery is a document published by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research titled, “The CIHR Institute of Gender and Health Listening Tour: What We Heard Report.”

In the report, one learns that in 2023, the Institute of Gender and Health went on a "national listening tour" to "co-create" their new Research Priority Plan for 2024-2029. The tour was comprised of 19 townhall events that were held in Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montréal. A total of 511 Canadian researchers, trainees, and community partners participated in the events.

During the listening sessions, the Institute asked attendees questions like:

* “How can we best foster research excellence regarding the influence of sex and gender on health?”

* “What is your vision for achieving health equity for women and girls, boys and men, and gender-diverse people?”

If one scrolls down to the appendix of the Institute’s 10-page report, one will find a finer breakdown of the demographic characteristics of the individuals who participated in the “listening tour.” From the page, we learn that 80% of the 511 attendees were academics, 12% were individuals with disabilities, and 4% were adults over the age of 65 years. In the bottom left of the page, we also see another interesting aspect of the demographic breakdown.

Only 19% of the “listening tour’s” demographic were men.

The Canadian government cannot hear what it does not want to listen to.

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