By Pramila Srinivasan, Ph.D., CEO, CharmHealth

In the lead up to International Women’s Day 2026, women’s health leaders, experts and insiders explore the critical challenges shaping the future of women’s health

For generations, women’s health was relegated to the margins of medical research, funding, and systems design. Today, it is becoming a market force.

Recent research shows women’s health investment topped US$2.6 billion in 2024 — a 55 per cent year-over-year increase.

If you expand the category to include the myriad health issues known to disproportionately affect women, we are looking at $10.7 billion in investment, as numbers continue to rise.

Women are finally being seen. This is fantastic! But it’s not everything.

Despite all of the positive data, women still navigate fragmented care pathways, receive delayed diagnoses, and face inconsistent outcomes across every life stage. Why?

It’s not a lack of passion or innovation or even investment dollars. It’s a lack of infrastructure.

We have been building around the system when we need to be building within it.

What “Infrastructure” Really Means in Women’s Health

When I talk about infrastructure, I mean the creation of a foundational layer that makes coordinated, longitudinal care possible.

It is vitally important that providers have all of the data they need regarding a patient’s health, following their story from a woman’s first OB/GYN visit all the way through menopause and beyond.

So, in terms of infrastructure, I’m referring to the tools that make this possible — interoperable EHR systems, AI that reduces documentation burdens, integrated clinical workflows, and billing models that support preventive and reproductive care.

This level of integration and coordination has been missing for far too long.

Lots of options are entering the market to address pieces of the puzzle, but when shiny new tools are introduced, however well-intentioned and well-designed, they typically require additional logins, more toggling between systems, and redundant manual entry.

While potentially solving one problem, technology all too often creates others.

The sad fact is that innovation that causes more friction won’t scale, no matter how good the tech is or how much potential it holds.

The Real Cost of Fragmentation

Consider a woman with gestational diabetes during her pregnancy. This fact is part of her chart, but the chart lives with her OB.

                         Pramila Srinivasan

Years later, this patient will be at higher risk for Type 2 diabetes, but her primary care provider may never have any idea.

This doesn’t happen out of a lack of caring but rather because systems between practices can’t talk to each other.

This failure to communicate and synthesize information can lead to misdiagnoses, unnecessary tests or medications, and delayed care.

Pregnancy complications are among the strongest early indicators of issues beyond diabetes; they can also predict things like future cardiovascular risk.

And to this point, pregnancy data almost never informs the longitudinal cardiovascular risk models that follow a woman through her life.

The persistent fragmentation issue also increases the cognitive load for clinicians who try to reconcile patient data across platforms.

They have to piecemeal everything together to get a complete picture of a patient, and doing a comprehensive job for every patient, day-in and day-out, is simply not feasible.

Advocating for their own care, then, often falls upon female patients themselves, who have long had their symptoms discounted or brushed aside.

This is not fair to anyone, but it has been our reality.

Point Solutions Alone Are Not Enough

I have profound respect for the founders building point solutions in women’s health.

Many are doing deeply important work that addresses long-neglected needs. This work is necessary and it matters.

For these solutions to achieve durable, system-wide impact, however, they must connect to the broader care delivery environment.

Clinical adoption depends on interoperability; sustainability depends on reimbursement alignment; meaningful outcomes depend on whether insights can travel with patients across providers and time.

And so on.

So how do we support modern solutions with the connective tissue necessary to scale? Building connective tissue is a shared responsibility — and a shared opportunity.

What Scalable Women’s Health Innovation Requires

As we press forward to define a better future for women’s health, it is paramount that we create longitudinal data architecture.

Think of how powerful it could be if reproductive, metabolic, cardiovascular, mental health and other domains were all connected through an integrated record that moved with a patient throughout her life, picking up all the signals from each clinically rich chapter of a single, continuous health story.

This should be a given, but we’re not there yet.

Next, we need AI embedded into the workflow, not layered on top of it.

AI will be indispensable in terms of proactively spotting issues, tracking indicators, surfacing information, and making sense of the millions of data points providers collect on patients throughout their lives — which can then be used to aid in physician decision-making.

AI can also provide a much-needed assist in supporting documentation.

By using AI for the things machines do well, we can free clinicians to do what only humans can, but it has to sit at the core not on the fringe.

We also have to have policy and reimbursement alignment. Innovation can’t continue to outpace payment models indefinitely.

Maternal health equity and preventive care need structural support as funded clinical priorities.

If we want providers to adopt and sustain women’s health solutions, the reimbursement framework has to make it viable.

And finally, we need privacy and governance rooted in trust. In reproductive health, in particular, this is absolutely vital.

For patients to feel comfortable sharing their data and engaging in a longitudinal, connected care model, they must be confident their information is secure and that they are protected.

Women are in an incredibly vulnerable position.

As such, data governance can’t be solely a compliance checkbox. It’s an ethical commitment.

The next wave of women’s health innovation won’t be defined by a single company or product.

It will be decided by whether we can build the infrastructure layer that allows those products to work together for everyone’s benefit.

If we are successful, we will positively shape the foundation of care for generations to come.

By Dr Mireia Galian, Medical Director at IVI London

In the lead up to International Women’s Day 2026, women’s health leaders, experts and insiders explore the critical challenges shaping the future of women’s health

In IVF treatment, timing is essential.

Before treatment begins, patients undergo an initial evaluation to assess the uterus and ovarian reserve.

This is done through a comprehensive ultrasound scan and hormonal tests to help plan the most appropriate treatment protocol.

Treatment itself starts with regular injections to stimulate the growth of multiple eggs simultaneously, rather than the single egg that would typically develop in a natural cycle.

Cycle progression is closely monitored with ultrasound scans and blood tests to track how these eggs grow and to determine the optimal time for them to be collected.

Eggs are collected in a single minimally invasive surgical procedure, known as egg retrieval or egg collection, which is precisely timed and carried out 36 hours after the final injection that induces their maturation and readiness for collection.

The eggs are then fertilised in the lab and incubated for a few days until embryos develop.

                            Dr Mireia Galian

At this stage, a suitable embryo can be transferred into the womb to achieve a pregnancy. Therefore, one round of IVF often requires five to seven appointments, carefully timed to optimise egg development and collection, followed by embryo transfer during the window of implantation.

The window of implantation is the period of time when the uterus is receptive to an embryo and able to implant it successfully.

Missing or delaying any of these appointments can negatively impact the outcome of treatment and the chances of success.

In addition to its practical implications, the need to adhere to such precise timing can cause significant distress and anxiety, adding an emotional burden to the physical toll that IVF can take on many patients and couples.

In light of the precision IVF treatment requires, it seems illogical that fertility treatment is legally characterised as an elective procedure in the workplace (equivalent to plastic surgery).

Not only must patients work around the body’s schedule, but they must also cope with the added stress of negotiating time off from work – often at short notice and almost always without pay.

In fact, a recent survey by the Fertility Network found that over one-third of employees undergoing fertility treatment have seriously considered leaving their jobs at some point.

With concerns around global falling birth rates and ageing populations, countries like Japan, Italy, and France have legislated the right to time off work for fertility treatment.

Despite the UK’s own birth rates reaching a record low of 1.4 children per woman, and concerns that deaths may outnumber births in 2026, the Government has not supported calls for the same legislation here.

Fertility outcomes and birth rates are not the only factors influenced by women not having access to time off for fertility treatments such as IVF.

The recently published FTSE Women Leaders Review for 2025 found that, while the proportion of women on company boards was improving, the number of female FTSE 100 chief executives remained stagnant, still at only nine.

Barriers clearly persist for women in the workplace, who, without supportive time off for fertility treatment, may find themselves forced to choose between career advancement and starting a family.

Workplaces that want to better support women undergoing fertility treatment must consider offering more inclusive and flexible policies, while also fostering an open, safe, and supportive culture.

This approach would help ensure that women are not forced to choose between their careers and starting a family, allowing them to navigate infertility without suffering in silence or relying on sick days and unpaid leave – both of which can negatively impact career progression.

Most importantly, it would enable sensitive and fair conversations between managers and employees, reducing the risk of adding unnecessary emotional discomfort to an already challenging personal situation.

Luckily, upcoming advancements in reproductive science and technology may help reduce some of the difficulty of balancing work and fertility treatment.

For instance, a research team at McGill University has recently developed a light-triggered microneedle patch that could make IVF hormone delivery painless and automated – potentially reducing some of the time pressure on patients in the run-up to egg retrieval.

Additionally, the analytical power of AI can be harnessed in fertility treatment to provide personalised predictions and improve embryo selection tools, which could enhance treatment success rates, streamline decision-making, and reduce the need for additional treatments, ultimately shortening the time to pregnancy.

It remains early days for much of this research.

While it advances, the priority remains ensuring that people undergoing fertility treatment have access to a compassionate and understanding support network – one that can and should include their workplace.

In the absence of legislation mandating a right to time off for fertility treatment, employers should step up to fill the gap and ensure that no one struggling with infertility also has to struggle at work.

By Dr Yifat Reuveni, Head of Research Department, NATAL

In the lead up to International Women’s Day 2026, women’s health leaders, experts and insiders explore the critical challenges shaping the future of women’s health

Trauma is not new in women’s lives.

What’s changing is how visible it has become, and how measurable, scalable, and technologically addressable it is becoming.

For decades, trauma research and treatment too often relied on a “one-size-fits-all” approach that quietly treated the male experience as the default.

Women were frequently included, but not always studied in ways that captured sex-specific biology, life-course transitions, caregiving burdens, or distinct exposure patterns.

The result has been a gap: not only in clinical understanding, but in product design, measurement standards, and digital care models.

As we approach 2026, women’s trauma is emerging as a defining challenge, but also as an opportunity.

Not because women are “more traumatic,” but because recent years have widened the scope of women’s trauma exposure while accelerating the tools we can use to detect risk, track recovery, and deliver personalized support.

From “Domestic” Framing to a Broader Trauma Map

For years, much of women’s trauma was framed as “domestic,” often linked primarily to relationships and interpersonal experiences.

In recent years, however, major events have exposed more women to combat-related trauma, terrorism-related trauma, and climate- and disaster-related trauma.

Women have not only coped as direct survivors, but have also carried secondary trauma as first responders and as caregivers/clinicians.

This broader exposure has enabled deeper and more consistent measurement of trauma responses over time, making it possible to track trajectories from acute stress to recovery and post-traumatic growth in women, and to compare these patterns with those observed in men.

In other words: the field is gaining the longitudinal data it previously lacked, data that can reveal patterns of resilience, functioning, and treatment needs that are specific, not assumed.

For women survivors as well as innovators, this is the shift that matters most: once measurement becomes systematic, innovation becomes accountable. Products can move from “wellness” to outcomes.

The Sex-Specific Mandate: Biology Is Not “Noise”

Dr Yifat Reuveni

A core pillar of this new era is the recognition that sex and gender differences should be studied directly, not treated as a footnote.

In trauma and PTSD-related conditions, biology can shape vulnerability, symptom expression, comorbidity patterns (including depression, anxiety, addiction, and somatic symptoms), and response to intervention.

Crucially, hormonal fluctuations across the lifespan, such as puberty, pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, should not automatically be treated as statistical noise.

These transitions can influence sleep, threat sensitivity, mood regulation, inflammation, and stress reactivity.

Many clinicians observe that some women experience symptom shifts during major hormonal or life-stage transitions such as labour; the opportunity now is to validate and quantify these patterns with better study designs and better continuous data.

This is where FemTech can lead: by helping convert episodic, clinic-based snapshots into continuous, real-world trajectories, capturing change, triggers, and recovery in context.

Trauma Lives in the Body: The Somatic Layer Is a Product Layer

Mental health has long been treated as a neck-up. But trauma is not only a narrative; it is also a physiological state.

Regulation, hyperarousal, dissociation, sleep disruption, and pain often sit at the intersection of mind and body, especially in chronic stress conditions.

Body-based approaches (movement, breath-informed practices, yoga-informed interventions, structured exercise) are increasingly integrated into trauma care, not as replacements for evidence-based psychotherapy, but as complementary supports that can improve regulation and functioning.

The key word is integration: trauma care works best when it meets the person’s needs across domains: psychological, physiological, relational, and functional.

This integration is still emerging in the trauma field and has yet to be translated into routine practice: Guided protocols between sessions, adaptive exercises based on symptom state, sleep and autonomic tracking, and modular support that adjusts intensity rather than forcing people into a single treatment program

Moral Injury: When Trauma Is About Meaning, Not Fear

Another rapidly growing focus is moral injury, a deep wound that can arise when a person experiences, witnesses, or feels implicated in events that violate his/her core moral beliefs.

PTSD is often anchored in threat, fear and grief; moral injury often centers on guilt, shame, feelings of betrayal, and loss of meaning.

This is especially relevant in roles that carry responsibility and moral burden: first responders, clinicians, humanitarian workers, educators, and caregivers: spaces where women are often overrepresented.

During prolonged crises, secondary trauma and moral distress can accumulate quietly, and PTSD symptom checklists alone may miss the heart of the struggle.

Moral injury raises a design challenge: how do we build tools that support values-based repair, self-compassion, relational restoration, trust building and meaning-making, without trivialising the experience or over-automating care?

This is where careful clinical partnerships, sensitive language, and trust models and protocols become essential.

From Awareness to Scalable, Evidence-Led Care

If 2026 is a turning point, it will be because technology helps trauma care become more accessible, personalised, and measurable, without sacrificing safety.

Three product directions feel particularly urgent:

1. Better measurement, less friction: Low-burden tracking of symptoms, sleep, regulation, and functioning designed for real life. This includes validated self-report tools, but also multimodal signals (sleep metrics, HRV trends, activity patterns) used responsibly and transparently.
2. Digital triage and care navigation: Many people don’t enter care because the first step is too unclear, too slow, or too stigmatized. Digital front doors, secure chat-based intake, stepped-care pathways, and rapid routing to the right level of support, can reduce drop-off and make help-seeking feel safer.
3. Personalisation across the life course: Trauma doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Menstrual cycles, fertility journeys, pregnancy/postpartum, menopause, caregiving load, and chronic health conditions can all shape mental health. FemTech is uniquely positioned to build life-course-aware supports that reflect women’s realities.

Women have always experienced traumaת but they have also functioned through it.

Access to richer data makes it possible to see not only women’s suffering, but also their strengths and sources of empowerment.

Findings that point to women’s resilience and capacity for growth should be studied in depth, to help develop prevention and growth-oriented methods and practices that can benefit everyone.

It is important to understand how the female psyche is harmed by trauma but it is equally important to recognise, and learn from, the strengths of the female psyche.

Of course, this frontier comes with responsibilities: privacy, data security, bias mitigation, clinical governance, and clear boundaries.

The goal is to build the scaffolding that helps more women reach care earlier, stay engaged longer, and recover more fully.