Rising Above the Status Quo: The Future of Women's Health and Wellness
Written by Jillian Levovitz, MBA, Chief Executive Officer, FemHealth Insights
Women's health has been a neglected field for far too long, with a significant lack of female-focused clinical research, limited understanding or appreciation of gender-specific health concerns, and a severe lack of funding to tackle these obstacles.
The historical practice of research being conducted predominantly, or exclusively, on male patients, both human and rodent, has resulted in medical training and diagnostic practices that rely heavily on male physiology, often neglecting considerations for females. Consequently, female symptoms are frequently categorized as rare or abnormal, leading to missed or delayed diagnoses for various conditions.
Perhaps not surprisingly, today, only 22% of physicians are comfortable recognizing cardiovascular disease in women, and endometriosis, a condition affecting over 6 million women in the US, can take an average of ten years to diagnose. Moreover, the normalization of pain complaints in women has also contributed to significant diagnostic delays, resulting in women experiencing more years of pain and disability compared to men.
Unfortunately, even once women reach an accurate diagnosis, the therapeutics that were developed based on male physiology, metabolism, and hormonal balances are often less effective for women or dosed incorrectly, resulting in double the complications and adverse reactions as compared to men.
Thankfully though, things are beginning to change. With the rise of females in leadership positions at large companies where they can influence corporate strategic direction; the growth of female investigators and scientists researching challenges that are relevant and interesting to them; and the increase of female investors who are twice as likely to invest in female-led companies, we are witnessing a new emphasis on improving female health and wellness.
Concurrently, societal changes are occurring, with less stigma around female conditions such as menstruation and menopause, and more openness to talk about symptoms and the need for better interventions. Regardless of the catalyst, women are increasingly less willing to accept a status quo in which pain and poor health are simply part of the female experience.
Recognition of the knowledge gaps and the pressing need for gender-specific research, diagnostic paradigms, and treatment algorithms are all leading to a surge in innovative solutions and dedicated investments from large healthcare players and new, smaller, companies.
Recently, there has been a remarkable explosion of startups dedicated to developing solutions for female health and wellness. The FemHealth Insights database indicates that over 65% of femtech companies were established in the past five years. Additionally, funding for these initiatives is on the rise as demonstrated by the shifting investments in FemTech digital health startups which grew from 5% of all digital health funding to 13% in 2022.
Innovation and investment in female health and wellness have also moved well beyond the traditional verticals of fertility and reproductive health to include a more holistic approach. Companies are now innovating solutions for conditions that have historically been stigmatized, such as hot flashes, mental health challenges, and female sexual wellness, as well as conditions that have a different or disproportionate impact on women, such as headaches or cardiovascular disease.
And, in addition to the breadth of conditions being treated, female health and wellness companies are also growing in every product segment, from remote patient monitoring devices used during pregnancy to therapeutics for menopause symptoms and at-home screening tools and diagnostic tests. There are also a plethora of consumer product goods (CPG), rapidly growing digital health communities, and robust educational platforms.
Despite this encouraging progress, female health and wellness still have a lot of ground to cover in terms of research, product development, and investment. Women’s health is still often thought of as a niche market and women still represent less than 50% of the patients in clinical trials. Further complicating matters, research funding for conditions that impact women still significantly lags behind funding for conditions that predominantly affect men. When the burden of disease is accounted for, the funding picture becomes even bleaker.
In order to shift this paradigm, FemHealth Insights is strategically focused on three key areas: continuing to build awareness and empathy for women’s health issues and their impact, prioritizing a comprehensive scope of the opportunity and need in FemHealth, and supporting the entire FemHealth ecosystem with data, visibility, and resources.
Building Awareness
Despite recent advancements, a lack of awareness, understanding, and empathy for the specific health challenges women face continues to pervade our society. This gap in understanding not only undermines women’s experiences but also hampers progress in improving their health. To address this, it’s crucial to elevate women’s voices and dismantle the harmful notion that pain and poor health are an inherent part of the female experience.
By fostering conversation we can help shift the standard approach of normalizing, or worse, gaslighting, women’s symptoms to an approach that actively seeks solutions to meet the diverse needs of this population. This paradigm shift, combined with increased awareness and understanding, will significantly enhance our ability to address women’s health challenges and drive meaningful progress in the Femhealth market.
A Comprehensive Approach
Female health and wellness spans numerous conditions and life stages. In order to adequately address the health challenges faced by this population, we need to reevaluate assumptions across all areas of development and specialties of medicine. This requires a multi-faceted approach that considers how research is conducted, including updating study protocols to ensure sex is included as a variable and successful recruitment of diverse patient populations.
Additionally, we need to improve the methods by which results are shared with the medical community to ensure that physician education and practice standards reflect these current best practices more rapidly.
Once research is complete, it is then important to consider different implementation needs for males and females. This may include evaluating dosing recommendations, product development specifications including size considerations, and product features that address the specific needs of female users.
Deep knowledge and expertise in women’s health is needed to identify the areas of opportunity and partnership at each stage of development to improve women’s health outcomes.
Lastly, there is a significant need to expand FemHealth innovation from a focus predominantly on symptom management to one that includes understanding causation and prioritizing evidence-based solutions. Of course, this requires early-stage companies and clinical investigators to have adequate funding for research, regulatory pathways, and product development.
Supporting the FemHealth Ecosystem
In 2022, only 1.9% of venture capital funding went to female founders. This shortage of investment dollars highly impacts women’s health startups, especially in the early stages of development, where females represent the leadership in 80% of companies.
With lower levels of funding, many of these young companies working on groundbreaking solutions remain largely invisible within the greater health markets — their potential misunderstood and inadequately tracked. The remedy lies in implementing more robust metrics and frameworks to accurately quantify and track the full range of women’s health issues and their impact on both quality of life and society at large.
Furthermore, the scarcity of support and crucial resources for research forces many women’s health startups to first ‘prove’ their relevance with non-regulated, or tested, direct-to-consumer products, stunting their growth, and significantly limiting their impact. A comprehensive understanding of women’s health and innovation is needed to identify promising early-stage startups and connect them with the resources needed to foster their growth. By supporting Femhealth startups at this crucial stage of development, we can spur innovation and catalyze more impactful changes in women’s healthcare.
Today there is an unprecedented focus on improving women's health. Still, it will be crucial to sustain momentum and build the right foundation to ensure the FemHealth market continues to evolve and has a lasting impact on female health and wellness worldwide.
About the Author:
Jillian Levovitz, MBA, is the Chief Executive Officer at FemHealth Insights. She is an experienced healthcare strategist with experience in many facets of the healthcare industry and the female health and wellness ecosystem. Jillian previously founded and successfully brought to market the novel medical device OcciGuide.