Too much of the work has been quietly handed back to women.
Women’s health is finally getting more public attention, but that doesn’t mean it’s being properly supported.
There are more reports, more policy conversations, more founders, more products, and more headlines than there used to be. There is more language for what many women have been living through for years. That’s progress of a kind. But attention isn’t the same thing as support, and it definitely isn’t the same thing as systems change.
What I keep seeing, in both the research and real life, is that women’s health has become something institutions quietly hand back to women when they don’t know how to deal with it well.
That’s the part I don’t think we’re naming clearly enough.
Women are still expected to notice the symptoms, track the patterns, do the reading, prepare for the appointment, explain the context, stay calm, sound credible, and keep functioning while all of that is happening. That burden shows up in healthcare, but it doesn’t stop there. It’s also present in research, funding, digital platforms, policy, and increasingly in AI systems that are now shaping what gets found, trusted, and taken seriously.
That’s why I keep coming back to the same conclusion: women’s health doesn’t only have a care problem; it has an offloading problem. Too much of the labour has been pushed onto the people already living with the impact.
“Women’s health doesn’t only have a care problem; it has an offloading problem.”
This isn’t a new issue. That’s exactly the point.
None of this is new information.
Women, especially marginalized women, have been saying for generations that pain gets dismissed, symptoms get psychologized, and care often arrives later than it should, if it arrives at all. Black women, Indigenous women, disabled women, trans and non-binary people, and those navigating multiple layers of inequity have often been carrying the sharpest edge of this for a very long time. The bias isn’t emerging. The disbelief isn’t new. The requirement to prove what shouldn’t require this much proof isn’t new either.
What feels especially sharp right now is how clearly the same pattern is showing up across multiple systems at once.
The exam room is only one version of it. The same logic shows up in what gets studied, what gets funded, what gets flagged online, what gets built into policy, and what AI systems are now learning to surface or ignore. Across all of it, the same burden keeps landing in the same place.
That should tell us something.
It should tell us that women’s health isn’t just being underserved, but also being treated as something that institutions still don’t fully understand how to hold.
What gets counted as serious?
A lot of this comes down to one question: what gets counted as important enough to build for?
McKinsey’s 2024 report found that women spend 25% more of their lives in poor health than men, roughly 9 years over a lifetime. The authors also said that the estimate is “probably conservative” because women’s health conditions have historically been underreported and undercounted. (McKinsey.com)
Let that sink in. I’ll wait.
Women’s health isn’t only underfunded; it’s often under-counted, under-recognized, and under-built in the first place.
That’s how whole areas of need stay structurally neglected while still being framed as niche, complex, or too difficult to address cleanly. It’s how institutions maintain the appearance of neutrality while women are left carrying the uncertainty in their bodies and lives.
The problem isn’t only that women’s health is being left behind. It’s that women’s health is still too often treated as less coherent, less objective, less commercially viable, or less urgent unless it can first be translated into forms institutions already recognize.
That translation comes at a cost.
“Women’s health isn’t only underfunded. It’s often under-counted, under-recognized, and under-built in the first place.”
Women are doing the system’s homework
This is the part I think the public conversation still tends to skate over.
We talk a lot about self-advocacy as if it’s always empowering. Sometimes it is. A lot of the time, it’s also evidence that the system has failed and handed the work back.
Too many women are doing the system’s homework for it.
They’re keeping symptom logs because no one else is connecting the dots. They’re learning which words sound serious enough to get through, and when to sound firm or agreeable. They already show up for appointments, prepared for gaslighting, pushback, and confusion. They’re translating their bodily experiences into terms institutions are more likely to understand. They’re doing the research.
That’s not a side effect of a complicated system. That’s labour.
It’s cognitive labour, emotional labour, administrative labour, and what I’d argue is also credibility labour. Women aren’t only trying to get help. They’re often trying to manage how believable they seem while asking for it.
That’s a brutal amount of work to normalize.
I know this because I’ve lived enough of it to recognize the shape. I know what it’s like to feel something is off in your body and still have to build a case for it. I know what it’s like to be told, directly or indirectly, that pain is normal, that symptoms are stress, that change is age, that side effects are simply part of being a woman. I’ve written before about the years of pain, the waiting, and the disconnect between what my body was telling me and what the system was prepared to confirm. That kind of gap changes you. It doesn’t only affect your health. It affects your trust in your own read on your own life. (medium.com)
That’s one reason I’m planting a flag here.
Not because I think I’m the first person to say any of this. I’m not. But because I work in communication and strategy, and I know what it looks like when something important gets flattened, delayed, softened, or treated as too messy to handle well. Women’s health is full of exactly those moments.
“Women aren’t only trying to get help. They’re often trying to manage how believable they seem while asking for it.”
This is bigger than healthcare
If this were only a clinical issue, it would already be serious enough. But it’s bigger than that.
The World Economic Forum’s Women’s Health Investment Outlook 2026 found that women’s health receives just 6% of private healthcare investment, despite women and girls making up nearly half the world’s population. (weforum.org)
The UK Parliament’s Women and Equalities Committee said in March 2026 that women’s health isn’t being sufficiently prioritized in NHS reforms and warned that systemic change is needed across health, education, and online communications. (committees.parliament.uk)
WHO and UNICEF reported in 2024 that only 39% of schools worldwide provide menstrual health education, and less than one in three schools globally have menstrual waste bins in girls’ toilets. In less developed countries, the numbers are far worse. (who.int)
And CensHERship’s 2025 white paper found that 95% of surveyed women’s health creators reported censorship, with medically accurate information still being flagged, restricted, or buried online. (censhership.co.uk)
These aren’t all the same issue, but they are all affecting the same system.
Different geographies. Different institutions. Different stakes.
Same pattern.
Women’s health keeps being treated as something to dance around rather than something institutions should already be designed to support.
That’s not just a healthcare issue. It’s a design issue. A trust issue. A legitimacy issue. And increasingly, an information issue.
“Women’s health keeps being treated as something to dance around rather than something institutions should already be designed to support.”
AI is learning from the same old mess
This is another place where I think we need to be more honest.
AI is often framed as if it’s going to clean up messy human systems and make everything more efficient, more discoverable, and more personalized. Maybe some of that will be true.
But AI doesn’t arrive free of history.
It learns from what already exists.
So if women’s health has already been undercounted, underfunded, misclassified, sexualized, buried, or treated as commercially risky online, AI isn’t building from neutral ground. It’s learning from a distorted record.
That matters because the same old credibility gap can now get baked into search, summaries, ranking, moderation, recommendation systems, and authority signals.
Once that happens, the issue doesn’t remain in the visibility category. It starts shaping public understanding, trust, discoverability, and access at scale.
That should concern all of us more than it seems to.
What this adds to the conversation
I’m not arguing that women’s health is important. We already know that.
I’m arguing that women’s health has become one of the clearest examples of what institutions do when they can’t handle complexity well.
They offload it.
They push the burden of translation, proof, coordination, persistence, and professionalism onto the people already carrying the impact.
That’s a care gap; it’s a structural pattern with a human invoice.
Women waste time. They lose trust, income, energy, and confidence. They are robbed of the right to simply be themselves and instead become project managers of their own survival.
That’s the part I don’t want polished away.
Why this sits right in the middle of my work
This sits right in the middle of what I care about most.
I care about what happens when language, power, and systems collide. I care about what gets lost between institutional intent and lived reality. I care about the work people are forced to do when the structures around them don’t hold.
Women’s health isn’t a side quest to me. It’s one of the clearest places where that failure is still playing out in public, in private, and in bodies.
And I don’t think the answer is another polished awareness campaign that makes everyone feel briefly informed. I think the answer starts with being more honest about where the burden has been sitting all along.
Spoiler: It’s been sitting with women.
That should unsettle us a lot more than it seems to.
References and further reading
McKinsey Health Institute
Closing the women’s health gap: A $1 trillion opportunity to improve lives and economies
https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/closing-the-womens-health-gap-a-1-trillion-dollar-opportunity-to-improve-lives-and-economies
McKinsey Health Institute
Closing the women’s health gap: Canada’s $37 billion opportunity
https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/closing-the-womens-health-gap-canadas-37-billion-dollars-opportunity
World Economic Forum / Boston Consulting Group
Women’s Health Investment Outlook 2026
https://www.weforum.org/publications/women-s-health-investment-outlook-2026/
UK Parliament, Women and Equalities Committee
Improving menstrual health must be prioritised in women’s health strategy and wider NHS reforms, WEC says
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/328/women-and-equalities-committee/news/212280/improving-menstrual-health-must-be-prioritised-in-womens-health-strategy-and-wider-nhs-reforms-wec-says/
CensHERship and The Case for Her
Censorship Revealed white paper
https://www.censhership.co.uk/white-paper
WHO / UNICEF
Global report reveals major gaps in menstrual health and hygiene in schools
https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2024-global-report-reveals-major-gaps-in-menstrual-health-and-hygiene-in-schools
Tokio Marine Kiln
FemHealth Report 2025
https://www.tmkiln.com/media/1jgpugab/tmk-femhealth-report-2025.pdf
Erin Beattie, Medium
The Pain They Told Me Was Normal
https://medium.com/@ehbeattie/the-pain-they-told-me-was-normal-f55fb9b90c62
Erin Beattie, Medium
We Are Still Becoming
https://medium.com/@ehbeattie/we-are-still-becoming-a-story-of-menopause-identity-and-renewal-132fb7d6e97b
