When women’s health is treated as optional, everyone pays

In England today, women are living longer – but not better. Healthy life expectancy for women has fallen by around 4% in recent years; women now spend more of their lives in poor health than men, and only the wealthiest third can expect to reach retirement still in good health. At a global level, we dedicate just 1% of healthcare R&D to female‑specific conditions, while women spend around 25% more of their lives in poor health than men.

This isn’t a gap. It’s a fault line running through our health system and our economy.

For me, working in the healthtech space across policy, media and market access, that’s not just a professional challenge; it’s a personal injustice. We see it in the everyday stories: NHS gynaecology waits stretching from around six weeks in 2018 to about fifteen weeks today, more than half a million women stuck on waiting lists, and conditions like endometriosis still taking close to a decade on average to diagnose. We see it in how women are heard: in recent UK research on the “gender pain gap”, 53% of women said their pain had been dismissed or ignored – a figure that jumps to 73% for young women aged 18–24.

The refreshed Women’s Health Strategy for England should be our roadmap out of this – a chance to hard‑wire women’s needs into how we design services, fund research and measure success. But our latest work and the wider evidence base show just how far we still have to go – and why healthtech must be part of the solution, not a side‑show.

The economic stakes: eleven billion reasons to care

The moral case for change is obvious. But if we stop there, we’re missing a powerful part of the story.

Analysis for the NHS Confederation and London Economics has put hard numbers on the economic cost of these gaps:

• Common menstrual and gynaecological conditions cost the UK nearly £11 billion a year in lost productivity.
• Around 60,000 women are out of employment because of menopause symptoms, at a direct cost of about £1.5 billion a year.
• The same analysis suggests that every additional £1 per woman invested in obstetrics and gynaecology could generate around £11 in economic return.

These are not “nice to have” investments. They are productivity, participation and growth strategies disguised as healthcare policy.

If women are spending more years in poor health, if they are pushed out of work or forced to scale back ambitions because of treatable or manageable conditions, the whole economy underperforms. The UK cannot talk credibly about growth while writing off billions in avoidable losses tied directly to the way we fund and design women’s health.

The good news: a wave of female leadership

Against this bleak backdrop, there is some very real good news.

We are seeing a growing wave of female leadership spanning healthtech, policy and advocacy:

• In the UK, around 76% of women’s health companies have at least one female founder.
• These founders are building solutions across the spectrum: digital diagnostics for endometriosis, remote menopause support, menstrual health trackers integrated with workplace policies, AI tools for earlier detection of gynaecological cancers.
• Women are increasingly visible in shaping policy and campaigning on women’s health – from Parliament and professional bodies to patient advocacy groups and grassroots movements.

In other words, the talent and ideas are not the limiting factor. The people closest to the problems are building the solutions.

But – and it’s a big but – this is still happening in spite of how capital and decision‑making power are distributed, not because of it.

The funding reality: 1.8% is not a rounding error, it’s a red glag

If you want to know how seriously an ecosystem takes something, follow the money.

In 2024, all‑female founding teams received just 1.8% of UK equity funding – around £190 million, compared with more than £8 billion for all‑male teams. That’s not just a disparity; it’s a structural signal about who is trusted to build the future of healthcare.

At the same time, we know that women’s health ventures are heavily female‑founded and focus on problems that are currently draining billions from the economy. Yet the capital flows still overwhelmingly favour the status quo.

When the founders most likely to solve women’s health challenges are the least likely to be funded:

• Promising innovations struggle to move from pilot to scale.
• NHS procurement teams see “immature” markets rather than investable technologies.
• The Women’s Health Strategy risks becoming a shopping list of ambitions without the tools to deliver them.

If we’re serious about closing the women’s health gap, funding is not a side note. It is a central lever.

Why the Women’s Health Strategy matters – and why it needs healthtech

The refreshed Women’s Health Strategy for England is an important step. It does three crucial things:

1. Acknowledges the scale of the problem – from clinical outcomes and waiting times to women’s lived experiences of pain and dismissal.
2. Sets a direction of travel towards more integrated, gender‑sensitive care and better data.
3. Creates a framework that local systems, clinicians, innovators and investors can align around.

But strategy documents don’t diagnose women’s health conditions any faster, or bring more women back into the workforce. That’s where healthtech is essential.

These companies can:

• Shorten the diagnostic journey through better screening, remote monitoring and decision‑support tools.
• Personalise care for conditions like menopause, PCOS, heavy menstrual bleeding and fertility challenges.
• Unlock new data on how women experience symptoms and respond to treatments in the real world.
• Bridge system gaps where traditional pathways are too slow, too centralised or too blind to gender differences.

The opportunity now is to plug these innovations into the Strategy, not bolt them on as pilots that never spread.

Three things we need to do next

Working with healthtech clients across policy, communications and market access, a few priorities come up again and again. If we want the Women’s Health Strategy to deliver, and if we want medtech and femtech to play the role they could, we need to:

1. Fund the right questions

We cannot close a 25% health gap with 1% of R&D.

• Increase dedicated research funding for female‑specific and female‑predominant conditions – from menstrual disorders to autoimmune diseases that disproportionately affect women.
• Make it standard, not exceptional, to disaggregate data by sex and gender in trials, observational studies and health service analysis.
• Back longitudinal and real‑world data projects that capture how women move through the health system and the workplace over time.

2. Fix the adoption pathway for women’s health innovations

Innovations that could transform women’s health often stall in the same place: between promising pilot and mainstream adoption.

We need:

• Clearer routes into NHS pathways for women’s health technologies, with simple, transparent criteria for evidence and value.
• Procurement models that reward long‑term impact – reduced waiting times, fewer repeat appointments, improved productivity – not just short‑term unit cost.
• Regulatory and reimbursement frameworks that recognise the specifics of women’s health, including conditions that have historically been under‑researched.

3. Move money and power, not just messages

Finally, we need to align capital, leadership and voice with where the need is.

• Increase the share of investment flowing to female‑founded healthtech ventures – through dedicated funds, LP mandates and accountability on where capital actually lands.
• Ensure more women – clinicians, patients, entrepreneurs – sit at the decision‑making tables: investment committees, guideline groups, procurement panels and policy boards.
• Use communications not just to raise awareness, but to shift norms: challenging diagnostic bias, championing women‑led innovation and making the economic argument impossible to ignore.

At Clarity, we see every day how powerful the combination of innovation, evidence and storytelling can be. Medtech and femtech are already building the tools. The Women’s Health Strategy offers a framework.

What’s missing is alignment – of policy, capital and public attention – around a simple idea:

Women’s health is not a cost centre; it’s a catalyst. For growth, for equity, and for a health system that finally works for everyone.

The work now is to make that more than a line in a speech – and to turn it into the way we design, fund and talk about health from here on.