Dr. Jill Biden’s Visit To UIC Shows The White House Is Ready To Make Women’s Health A Priority

At the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) on Jan. 11, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden and Academy Award-winning actress Halle Berry led a historic roundtable discussion on advancing women’s health research. The visit, part of the comprehensive White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research launched in November 2023, highlighted the White House’s groundbreaking efforts to support women’s health research, including menopause and cognition.

The White House Initiative on Women’s Health is the latest continuation of Dr. Biden’s longstanding commitment to improving women’s health research, a field that has been historically underfunded, leading to vast research gaps between men and women’s health. In a White House press statement, Dr. Biden stated, “Every woman I know has a story about leaving her doctor’s office with more questions than answers. … Our new White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research will help change that by identifying bold solutions to uncover the answers that every woman and her family deserves.” 

Led by Dr. Biden and the White House Gender Policy Council, and chaired by Dr. Carolyn Mazure, the initiative is a collaborative effort among various federal departments and agencies. These include the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services, Defense, Veterans Affairs, and White House offices like the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Under President Joe Biden, initiative members will recommend strategies for the Biden-Harris Administration to enhance women’s health research and address health disparities. The plan involves a targeted approach, focusing on critical areas such as heart attacks and menopause, where increased funding for gender-specific research is vital. Moreover, the initiative will engage leaders from both the public and private sectors in a collaborative effort to advance women’s health research.

At the UIC roundtable, Dr. Biden addressed the diverse and often under-recognized healthcare challenges faced by women across America. “If you ask any woman in America about her healthcare, she likely has a story to tell,” she said. “She’s the woman who dies because her heart disease isn’t recognized, since her symptoms don’t look like a man’s symptoms and a man’s heart attack, women are more likely to die after a heart attack, even though men and women have them at similar rates. This has to stop, and my husband, President Biden, is doing something about it.”

Berry shared her personal experience, telling the audience she initially had no idea what was happening to her when she began experiencing changes in her body and health. After attempting to solve her health issues with diet and exercise, to no avail, Berry went to a doctor. “He said, ‘Well, you can take hormones and here’s what you do, and then it’ll pass.’ Well, that didn’t feel like that was good enough for me, and I felt like if that’s not good enough for me and I have access to some of the best doctors in the world, how could this be good enough for every other woman?”

Berry emphasized, “Money needs to be raised and allocated so that doctors can be retooled, so that we can have more experts. So that every woman has an opportunity to get quality premium care and not just told, ‘You have to just white knuckle it. It will eventually pass.’”

Leading researchers have stressed the urgent need for health officials to recognize and address women’s health issues during annual visits, highlighting the growing bipartisan effort in Congress to tackle specific conditions like fibroids and menopause. During the visit to UIC, Dr. Biden and Berry, along with Congresswoman Robin Kelly, Congresswoman Lauren Underwood, and others, were able to observe a hands-on study on the side effects of menopause in a lab with Dr. Pauline Maki, a professor of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Obstetrics & Gynecology at UIC, and graduate students Alexandra Paget Blanc and Rachel Schroeder. 

These types of studies being done on campuses like UIC, and across the nation, only encourage Dr. Biden in the future of women’s health research. “The White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research will ensure that women are not just an afterthought, but a first thought. We will build a future where women leave doctor’s offices with more answers than questions, where medicine meets the needs of everyone, and where no woman or girl has to hear, ‘it’s all in your head’ or ‘it’s all just stress.’ Together, we’re going to make that future a reality.”

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