If funding shapes outcomes, why are women’s organisations still underfunded?

The UK Government has just relaunched its women’s health strategy with a pretty striking admission: the system has failed women. From delayed diagnoses to inadequate pain relief, there’s now open acknowledgement of what many have been saying for years. Namely, that there is such a thing as 'medical misogyny', and it has real consequences: a systemic pattern of underinvestment, dismissal and neglect.

One of the more interesting shifts in the new strategy is the suggestion that funding should be more closely linked to women’s actual experiences. What they're explicitly saying is: how we fund things shapes what gets delivered.

That feels obvious. But it’s also a question that doesn’t stop at the NHS.

Because if we accept that funding structures can embed inequality in healthcare, we have to ask: why are we still funding the women’s sector in ways that almost guarantee instability?

For decades, women’s organisations have been expected to respond to some of the most complex and entrenched issues, such as violence, poverty and mental health, with short-term, fragmented funding that bears no relation to the scale of need. The women's sector never quite gets to the point where it can breathe, let alone grow.

What’s frustrating is that we know how to fund things properly when we decide to.

We see it in infrastructure. In large-scale public investment. Even in targeted areas of social policy, where the government can move quickly and at scale when there’s political will.

But when it comes to women and girls, the funding landscape is still patchy, piecemeal, and precarious.

And that has consequences.

Because funding isn’t neutral. It shapes priorities. It shapes capacity. It shapes whether organisations can plan for the long term or are forced into survival mode.

If the system is underfunded and unstable, the outcomes will be too. We'll just carry on with a system that struggles to deliver the long-term change women need.

This is why we're calling for a long-term, sustainable funding solution to the chronic underfunding crisis facing the women's sector. And we've even proposed a model for how this could look in the form of an ethical endowment funded through dormant assets - The Women's Forever Fund!

Because there’s something pretty ironic about the current moment. On the one hand, we’re seeing increasing recognition that systems have failed women, and that those failures are structural, not incidental. On the other hand, we’re still relying on funding models that reproduce those same patterns of instability and underinvestment.

Because the question isn’t whether women’s organisations are effective. We already know they are.

The question is whether we’re finally ready to fund them like it actually

matters.