WHAM

Women’s Health Access Matters (WHAM), a non-profit organization, was formed by Carolee Lee in July 2019 as an initiative to focus on increasing awareness of women’s health issues, investing in women’s health research and implementing strategies to improve the inequities and bias in research while accelerating scientific discovery and economic impact.

A board of 25 leading business women launched this initiative, which became its own 501c3 in 2021. The WHAM Report was created to quantify the economic benefits of investing in women’s health research.

WHAM is recognized as the preeminent resource for data quantifying the economic benefits of increasing investment in women’s health research. The WHAM Report is the first in a series of groundbreaking reports showing the economic impact of accelerating women’s health research. WHAM has shifted the conversation from focusing solely on the underrepresentation and understudied role of women in research, to spotlighting the powerful economic return on investment that our data validates.

The Connors Center at Brigham/Harvard is WHAM’s Lead Scientific Partner. Partners and Collaborators of The WHAM Reports include The RAND Corporation, American Heart Association, La Jolla Institute for Immunology, BrightFocus Foundation and GO2 for Lung Cancer. Additional partners in WHAM’s efforts include Northwell Health, KPMG, Research!America, Global Coalition on Aging, Magee-Womens Research Institute and Walgreens.