By Katrina Zalcmane, co-founder | partnerships and growth, Véa

The global corporate wellness market reached US$70.65 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit US$128 billion by 2033 – Europe leads the charge, capturing over 39.5 per cent of market share.

Meanwhile, femtech investment hit US$2.2 billion in 2024, representing 8.5 per cent of all digital health funding.

The message is clear: companies recognise that employee wellness matters and women’s health technology is finally getting serious investment.

So why are women still drowning?

In the UK, 91 per cent of adults report experiencing high or extreme stress levels – despite consumers spending an average of US$3,342 annually on wellness and self-care.

60 per cent of women in leadership positions report feeling constantly burned out, while 69 per cent of women feel emotionally drained after every workday.

Around 1 in 4 working women say they can’t manage workplace stress, with only 44 per cent confident their employer even has a burnout plan.

The numbers don’t add up. Billions flowing into wellness programmes. A femtech revolution promising personalised solutions.

And yet women ages 25-45 – the backbone of the modern workforce – are hitting crisis levels of exhaustion.

The problem isn’t a lack of investment – it’s what we’re investing in.

The Mismatch: What Companies Offer vs What Women Actually Need

Health risk assessments captured 21.2 per cent of the European corporate wellness market in 2024, while stress management programmes hold 13 per cent market share and continue expanding.

Companies are checking boxes: biometric screenings, mental health apps, flexible work, meditation subscriptions.

Yet these programmes consistently miss three critical factors:

1. Emotional data is invisible

Modern workplaces reward thinking, problem-solving and constant cognitive output.

What gets lost is the intelligence that comes from recognising early warning signals in the body – somatic indicators that burnout is building long before it becomes visible.

Women are taught to “think through” stress rather than listen to what their bodies are telling them. By the time burnout shows up in productivity metrics or sick days, the damage is done.

2. Hormonal rhythms are ignored

Corporate wellness assumes constant, linear productivity.

But women’s bodies don’t work that way. Menstrual cycles, perimenopause, fertility journeys – all create natural energy fluctuations that impact focus, stress response and cognitive performance.

Instead of working with these rhythms, most women fight against them, blaming themselves for “productivity dips” that are actually biological.

The result is chronic disconnection from their bodies and accelerated burnout.

3. Emotional labour stays uncounted

Women carry disproportionate loads of invisible work – managing team dynamics, mentoring, smoothing conflicts, holding space for others’ stress.

This labour never appears on performance reviews or workload assessments.

It accumulates beneath the surface until women hit a wall.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong

In the UK, mental health-related absences cost the economy approximately £21.6 billion annually, with employees taking 34 million sick days each year due to stress, depression and anxiety.

Employee burnout costs an average 1,000-person company US$5.04 million per year globally. Burned-out employees are 6 times more likely to leave, costing companies 50-200 per cent of salary in recruiting and training.

For women specifically, the crisis deepens.

Women new to leadership report 70 per cent burnout rates; for women of colour in senior positions, it reaches 77 per cent..

Nearly 40 per cent of women actively seeking new jobs cite burnout as the primary reason.

Replacing a mid- or senior-level woman costs up to 213 per cent of her annual salary.

We’re not just losing individual contributors but hemorrhaging the women leaders who hold institutional knowledge, mentor the next generation and drive diversity initiatives.

What Needs to Change

Instead of more generic wellness programs, we need to fundamentally rethink how we support women at work.

1. Shift from crisis response to prevention

Only 44 per cent of women feel confident their employer has a burnout plan – but by then, you’ve already lost.

Companies must teach women to recognise burnout signals in their bodies before a crisis hits. Somatic awareness catches exhaustion early, when intervention still works.

2. Design work around cyclical energy, not constant output

Women need organisational cultures that acknowledge hormonal rhythms as legitimate biological factors affecting performance.

This means training managers to understand energy fluctuations and designing workloads that account for them instead of just offering “flexible arrangements”.

3. Make invisible labour visible

Emotional labor must be quantified, acknowledged and redistributed.

This requires new frameworks for measuring contributions beyond traditional output metrics and structural changes preventing this work from defaulting to women.

4. Prioritise personalisation over one-size-fits-all

Workforce wellness now centres on personalisation powered by AI and data analytics.

A 27-year-old establishing her career has completely different needs than a 42-year-old navigating perimenopause while caring for ageing parents.

AI-driven platforms can deliver tailored support – virtual health assistants, personalised insights, telemedicine – making care more accessible for women balancing careers, family and wellness.

The Opportunity

Closing the women’s health gap could add at least $1 trillion annually to the global economy by 2040.

But unlocking that value requires interventions addressing burnout’s root causes, not just symptoms.

The market is already voting.

Virtual workplace wellness programmes saw substantial growth following the pandemic and Europe continues leading corporate wellness investment.

Companies in the UK and France are implementing AI-driven burnout assessments, hybrid wellness platforms and data-driven mental health monitoring.

Still, investment alone isn’t enough.

The question isn’t whether companies will spend on women’s wellness – they already are.

The question is whether they’ll invest in solutions that actually work: reconnecting women with somatic intelligence before burnout becomes visible, designing around hormonal rhythms rather than fighting them and making invisible labour visible so it can be redistributed.

The companies that do will win the talent war.

The ones that don’t will keep wondering why their best women keep leaving.

About Véa Workshops

Véa offers evidence-based corporate wellness workshops designed specifically for women professionals, addressing the root causes of burnout that traditional programs miss.

Grounded in neuroscience, psychology and somatic awareness, Véa workshops focus on prevention rather than crisis response – teaching women to recognise emotional data and somatic signals, work sustainably with hormonal rhythms and make invisible labor visible.

Available in formats from 45-minute executive sessions to half-day leadership offsites, these workshops support sustainable performance without asking women to step back from ambition.

Learn more at veajournal.app/workshops.

By Katrina Zalcmane, head of partnerships and growth, Véa

The next era of femtech shifts focus from platforms to people as women rethink how technology fits into wellness and social life.

Women are spending less time on ambient, always-on digital environments and more time in bounded, intentional, in-person settings.

This is not a rejection of technology but a reprioritisation of how and where it belongs. For femtech, this shift is not cosmetic. It signals a structural change in user expectations – one that has implications for product design, engagement models and long-term relevance. 

I explore three key signals underpinning this shift: reduced engagement with social media platforms, the resurgence of in-person, women-led communities and growing fatigue with fragmented digital tools.

Signal 1: Declining Engagement With Social Platforms Among Women

Multiple data sources point to a flattening or decline in engagement with traditional social media platforms, particularly among women:

• Pew Research Center reports that adults are increasingly “actively limiting” their social media use, with women more likely than men to cite emotional exhaustion and reduced wellbeing as reasons.
• Ofcom’s Online Nation report shows year-on-year declines in time spent on social platforms among UK women aged 25–44, alongside rising use of messaging and offline coordination tools.
• Meta itself has acknowledged a shift away from “social graph” engagement toward private, smaller-group interactions in recent earnings calls.
  

While this is not mass abandonment, it does indicate selective withdrawal: fewer platforms, less ambient presence, more intentional use.

Signal 2: The Rise of In-Person, Women-Led Communities

At the same time, participation in physical, community-based activities has increased. Examples include:

• the growth of women-led run clubs and fitness collectives across major cities, often operating independently of digital platforms;
• the expansion of paid, small-scale retreats and circles focused on reflection, creativity or embodiment;
• increased demand for local, recurring group experiences rather than one-off events.
  

While women are stepping back from social platforms, they are stepping into real-world communities. ONS data on social capital shows a post-pandemic rebound in in-person participation, particularly among women aged 25-45, with a preference for smaller, repeat gatherings over large social events.

What distinguishes this wave of community-building is intentionality. These spaces are bounded, often invitation-based and deliberately offline.

They are designed to counteract overstimulation rather than add to it.

Signal 3: Tool Fatigue and the Consolidation of Digital Habits

Alongside social media fatigue, there is growing evidence of “tool fatigue” across wellness and productivity categories:

• App retention rates across health and wellness remain low, with industry benchmarks showing that fewer than 25 per cent of users remain active after 30 days.
• Deloitte’s Digital Consumer Trends report notes a move toward app consolidation, with users preferring fewer, multi-purpose tools over fragmented stacks.
• Qualitative studies show women are particularly sensitive to cognitive overload caused by managing multiple apps for mood, cycles, health, reflection and social coordination*.

The implication is not that women want less support but that they want smarter, simpler tools that can actually help manage their inner lives.

What This Means: A Shift in the Role of Technology

Taken together, these signals point to a clear trend: technology is moving from being a primary site of social life to a supporting layer around it.

Women are not asking apps to become communities. They are asking them to:

• help them reflect and process privately;
• reduce cognitive and emotional clutter;
• support real-world relationships rather than replace them;
• operate in bounded, intentional ways.

This reframes success metrics. Engagement time and daily active use become less meaningful than whether a tool genuinely increases capacity, clarity and presence outside the app.

Implications for Femtech

For femtech, this marks a decisive transition. The first phase of femtech focused on visibility: tracking cycles, symptoms and bodily data that had previously been ignored.

The next phase will focus on integration: helping women make sense of experience in ways that support how they live, relate and gather.

Femtech products that attempt to:

• replicate community digitally,
• build social feeds under the banner of wellbeing,
• position AI as a substitute for real connection,
  

risk misaligning with where behaviour is actually moving. 

By contrast, femtech that treats technology as infrastructure, not destination, is better positioned for longevity.

Where Véa Fits

Véa was built with this shift in mind.

Rather than attempting to replace connection or build another social layer, Véa focuses on internal processing – neuroscience-backed journaling, emotional pattern recognition and reflective AI support – so that women can show up more clearly in their real lives.

Importantly, Véa is not only a digital tool.

It is designed to extend into physical space, through curated in-person experiences and community gatherings that prioritise presence, embodiment and shared reflection.

The digital layer exists to support the human one, not compete with it. In a context of tool fatigue and selective disengagement, this hybrid model – digital support paired with real-world interaction – aligns closely with how women are choosing to engage today.

Over the next decade, the most resilient femtech products will not be those that maximise time spent inside ecosystems but those that give women back the capacity to return to their lives – with greater clarity, energy and real-world connection.

It’s time to design femtech that empowers presence over engagement.

*Reich-Stiebert, N., Froehlich, L. and Voltmer, J.-B. (2023). ‘Gendered mental labor: A systematic literature review on the cognitive dimension of unpaid work within the household and childcare’, Sex Roles, 88, pp. 475–494.

Modern tech work blurs the boundary between focus and fatigue. Notifications spill into evenings, side projects jostle for attention, and the same screens we use to ship code stream our downtime. The answer is not to disconnect completely. It is to design small, protective rituals that restore energy while keeping a gentle sense of control. Short, low pressure restorative online play can sit alongside other evening habits without draining tomorrow’s focus.

Make Recovery a Feature, Not a Fix

Burnout rarely arrives in a single moment. It builds through micro stresses that never get cleared. Treat recovery as a product feature you ship every evening, simple and reliable rather than grand and rare. Start with boundaries that mark the end of the workday. Close the laptop, write a one line note about tomorrow’s first task, and put your kit out of sight. That single gesture creates a clean edge the brain respects.

Then change the environment. Shift lighting from cool to warm, swap the chair for the sofa, and set your phone to a calmer home screen. These cues matter. They tell your nervous system the mode has changed so you can mix mental rest with light engagement that still feels intentional.

Short, Screen-literate Rituals That Actually Work

• A ten minute mobility or stretch video resets posture after hours at a desk
• A tidy loop, like clearing the downloads folder or filing screenshots, reduces digital noise
• A breath guided practice that ends on the dot gives a measurable downshift
• A single chapter of a book or a short podcast episode keeps attention light and finite

When energy is low, aim for the smallest possible win. Two minutes of breathing still counts. One drawer tidied is still progress. Preserve the shape of recovery rather than chasing perfection.

Where Light Online Play Fits

Play is a human need, not a teenage phase. In the right dose it helps down regulate stress and restores a sense of agency after a day of reacting to tickets and pings. Keep it light and bounded. Choose modes that resolve in fifteen to twenty minutes, mute work apps, and set a visible stop time before you start. The aim is a calm, finite session that ends cleanly.

Cosy builders, puzzles, or narrative adventures often deliver novelty without social pressure. If you prefer something social, co-op rounds that finish quickly provide connection without dragging the night. Headphones with a gentle volume limit protect shared spaces and evening quiet.

Pair play with tiny chores so life runs smoother. Start a short download, fold laundry while it completes, then enjoy your round guilt free because the house already feels calmer. This is deliberate energy management, not indulgence.

Design a Space That Calms On Sight

• Put a warm lamp on a simple timer so evenings do not begin under harsh light
• Keep controllers, headphones, and chargers in one tray so play starts cleanly and puts away fast
• Use a standing phone dock during dinner to avoid reflex checks
• Keep the bedroom device light and cool in tone so your brain associates the space with sleep

If you live with others, make the evening rhythm visible. A shared quiet hours note, a soft household wind down alarm, and a last call for dishwashing help everyone respect the boundary between work and rest.

A Weeknight Template That Holds Under Pressure

• Shutdown: one line for tomorrow, close tabs, quick desk tidy
• Reset: ten to fifteen minutes to settle the kitchen and lay out morning basics
• Nourish: simple dinner that keeps cleanup minimal
• Reward: one short activity on a timer, with light online play as an option
• Wind down: warm lights, gentle stretch, phone on do not disturb, consistent lights out

If you miss a step, shrink it rather than skipping the whole routine. Small completions compound. Over a month they beat heroic bursts every time.

Leadership Starts With Example

Team norms shape personal wellbeing more than any tool. If you manage others, model sane hours and visible shutdowns. Delay send late emails, publish focus blocks, and praise outcomes over urgency theatre. Encourage short, restorative breaks through the day so evenings do not have to undo quite as much. When leaders normalise humane rhythms, teams follow and results improve because people are not running on fumes.