Shifting the Narrative in Women’s Health

AMSTERDAM, the Netherlands — When it comes to women’s health, many people still think of “breasts, uteruses, and hormones,” Petra Simic, PhD, a medical director at Bupa Health Clinics, said at HLTH Europe 2025 conference. But as clinicians, investors, and advocates made clear at the gathering, it is vastly more than that.

The tide is slowly changing, fueled by data, technology, and a growing chorus of women’s voices. Yet from diagnostics and research to clinical training and policy, systemic gaps remain. Acknowledging and actively closing these gaps is not just a matter of equality, it’s a step toward better health outcomes for everyone, Anna Coates, PhD, a senior gender technical lead at the World Health Organization (WHO), told Medscape Medical News.

Here Are Some Numbers

The statistics around women’s health remain shockingly grim, and their repetition might be a necessary reminder of the scale of the problem. Here are some numbers reported at the conference:

• Although women live longer than men, they spend 25% of their lives in greater illness and disability than men, which equates to an average of 9 years of poor health.
• Women are seven times more likely to be discriminated against by a healthcare provider.
• A woman is three times more likely than a man to be dismissed during a doctor’s consultation. For the same disease, it can take a woman four times longer to receive a diagnosis.
• It takes an average of 6-10 years to diagnose a condition like endometriosis.
• A woman having a heart attack is seven times more likely to be dismissed and misdiagnosed in the emergency room and twice as likely to die as a result.
• While women constitute 70% of patients with chronic pain, 80% of pain medication research is conducted on men or male animals.
• Geography and income drastically alter outcomes. A woman diagnosed with breast cancer in a high-income country like Denmark has a 85%-90% 5-year survival rate. In India, that drops to around 60%, and in Nigeria, it is < 50%.
• In the US, a woman is now twice as likely to die in childbirth as her own mother was.
• Only 4% of venture capital investment in healthcare is directed toward women’s health.

Kristen Cerf, president and CEO at Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan (PHP), pointed out that “these statistics — every single one of them — worsen when talking about women of color.”

These issues result in 75 million years of life lost due to poor health or early death annually. Closing the women’s health gap could inject $1 trillion into the global economy by 2040.

A Societal Problem Reflected in Healthcare

These disparities are not solely a healthcare problem. Coates said that healthcare systems reflect broader society. “If women are not generally valued, then we’re going to see that replicated in the health system.” This isn’t an external problem for medicine to point to, but rather one that it is an integral part of, she said. “It’s a societal problem, and you are part of that big society problem. So if the health system doesn’t change, it’s not playing its own role in that bigger societal change.”

“It is a system’s failure because mostly men have created that system,” said Moz Siddiqui, a senior gender technical lead at the WHO Foundation. This systemic failure requires systemic stimuli to change. “Systems don’t change unless there are external stimuli,” said Cerf. But while moral arguments persist, many panelists agreed that financial and economic arguments are often more potent drivers. “If the clinical and the patient perspective doesn’t move governments, certainly the economics should move governments,” argued Tisha Boatman, who is responsible for external affairs and healthcare access at Siemens Healthineers. When the cost of misdiagnosis, lost productivity, and delayed treatment is quantified, the imperative to invest in women’s health becomes undeniable, she said.

Sleep: The Overlooked Pillar of Women’s Health

“Sleep is really a core pillar of health, and it’s just as important as nutrition, exercise, and stress resilience,” said Jennifer Kanady, PhD, director of sleep health technology at Samsung Electronics. Yet it is often the first thing to be sacrificed and the last to be addressed in clinical settings.

Poor sleep is linked to increased risks for diabetes, heart disease, and dementia, and its patterns change significantly across a woman’s life, influenced by menstrual cycles, pregnancy, and menopause. Insomnia, for example, might increase during pregnancy or the menopausal transition, but the causes and treatments might differ significantly depending on which of those phases a woman is in. 

This is where the diagnostic challenge becomes critical. A woman in perimenopause may visit her doctor complaining of fatigue and poor sleep. “It might be diagnosed as insomnia, and the pattern is completely different,” said Ines Ramos Barreiras, EMEA regional medical advisor at Bayer. The root cause isn’t a primary sleep disorder but a hormonal shift, meaning that a standard prescription for insomnia won’t target the problem at its source. “It’s not only a problem of sleep, but how sleep is impacted,” she said. “In menopause, women can go to sleep, but sleep is not as restoring as it needs to be.”

Not a Smaller Man’s Heart 

Cardiovascular disease is another space where a knowledge and awareness gap persists, both in the public domain and among healthcare practitioners. The public may not know the risks — Simic noted that a woman aged 45-65 years is 17 times more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than breast cancer — but the more critical gap is often with clinicians. “We should stop treating the women’s heart as a variation of the male heart,” said Michiel Winter, MD, a cardiologist at the Amsterdam University Medical Center who specializes in digital health. “There’s a very distinct difference. Risk factors like hypertension are much more harmful in women than in men, and it also means that they get different heart diseases, and that means different diagnostics and different therapy.”

Even as technology advances, these old biases are being coded into new systems. “Most algorithms are made for more male-specific cardiovascular disease,” Winter noted. For example, because the ST elevation in a female myocardial infarction is often less pronounced, “the AI [artificial intelligence] algorithm picks up male STEMI (ST-elevation myocardial infarction) much more easily than it does for female.” Similarly, algorithms for interpreting ultrasounds are often better at identifying systolic heart failure (more common in men) than diastolic heart failure (more common in women).

The Inevitable Transition 

For too long, the narrative around menopause has been one of cessation and decline — a silent, private struggle marking the end of a woman’s reproductive value. However, panelists at the HLTH Europe 2025 conference made clear that the story is being rewritten forcefully. What was once a taboo topic is now a “menopause boom,” a global conversation fueled by a new generation of women demanding better information, care, and visibility, said Jocalyn Clark, the international editor at the British Medical Journal.

“When I came out of medical school, women disappeared from view of the health service at the age of 50 because they were postreproductive,” said Dame Lesley Regan, MD, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Imperial College London, London, England, and England’s first Women’s Health Ambassador. This perspective is dangerously outdated. With increasing lifespans, many women will now spend more of their lives postmenopausal than reproductive, she said.

The health risks that accelerate after menopause, such as cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis, are often overlooked in clinical consultations, often because healthcare professionals lack comprehensive menopause training, Regan said. In the UK, for example, general practitioners are no longer required to complete mandatory training in obstetrics and gynecology.

Regan proposed that every healthcare professional — from orthopedic surgeons to cardiologists — should ask their female patients a simple question: “Do you still have periods?” This, she argued, is a simple but important step to identifying women in the menopausal transition and ensuring their holistic health is considered.

A New Narrative 

The challenges are systemic, rooted in societal norms, and reflected in every corner of the healthcare industry. However, the collaboration between innovators, the commitment from advocates, and the increasing demand from patients are creating momentum, said Bayo Curry-Winchell, MD, a general practitioner in Reno, Nevada, and content creator.

The solution lies in changing the narrative, she said. It requires normalizing conversations about menstruation, menopause, and every aspect of women’s health. It means designing systems, products, and policies with women at the center. Most importantly, it involves listening to women from diverse backgrounds.

As Ramos Barreiras said, there is a cultural expectation for women to be quiet. “We don’t complain. We were taught to be strong and to endure. And this is the shift we are seeking: to empower women to be vocal about what we want and the quality of life we deserve.”

Simic is a medical director at Bupa Health Clinics; Cerf is the president and CEO at Blue Shield of California PHP; Boatman is responsible for external affairs and healthcare access at Siemens Healthineers; Kanady is the director of sleep health technology at Samsung Electronics; Ramos Barreiras is a EMEA Regional Medical Advisor at Bayer. 

Manuela Callari is a freelance science journalist specializing in human and planetary health. Her work has been published in The Medical Republic, Rare Disease Advisor, The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, and others.