“Women’s health has been plagued by gender bias. Where do opportunities for innovation lie?”

Underfunded, under researched, and under innovated. Since the early days of medicine, women’s health has been plagued by gender bias, resulting in poorer delivery, chronic misdiagnosis and higher risk of fatality.

Women in the UK have clearly decided it’s time for change. In March 2021, 110,000 women responded to a call for evidence – around 10x the average response – leading to the first government-led Women’s Health Strategy to address challenges around the gender health gap.

An area ripe for innovation, impacting over half the population, this is a powerful opportunity for founders to drive forward innovation on understanding women’s health challenges, around how women access healthcare and the quality of care they receive.

There are some glaringly obvious areas that require serious attention and innovation.

First and foremost, efforts around improving access to health services.

For one, women-specific conditions – such as endometriosis and PCOS – are chronically underserved, seeing far longer waiting times, and therefore pose considerable risk. Start-ups like Bloomful offer digital care pathways to help improve access for patients.

It’s also worth considering the ease at which women can access reproductive health products, particularly given certain taboos around this topic.

Founded after one of the founders ran into her boyfriend’s mum while buying a pregnancy test, Stix is a DTC women’s health platform offering a convenient and discreet way to access products from emergency contraception to pregnancy tests.

The gender data gap has also come to the fore in recent years, particularly following the popularity of Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women.

For years, women have been directly underrepresented in research and clinical trials—for example, in psychiatry, where mean participation of women in trials was just 42 per cent,  while 60 per cent of patients are women.

Hertility is one start-up looking to close the gap. They’re building the largest data set on gynaecological pathologies, powering their digital diagnostic tool that can screen for 18 reproductive health conditions in just 10 days.

But even among women, there is a huge gap to close. Women experience radically different outcomes depending on their ethnicity and socio-economic background.

Black women in the UK are four times more likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth than white women. The digital health platform Mae, for example, hopes to change this by connecting black expectant mothers to critical resources to drive improved outcomes.

The Women’s Health Strategy has indeed put focus on a number of issues, but there are still challenges that need solving in order to bring women’s health to where it needs to be.

For one, the sector still suffers from a lack of investment. 2021 saw US$1bn invested in women’s health start-ups – a number that needs to grow significantly to see any meaningful change.

Founders need to see the right funding mechanisms in place, with clear aims and assessment criteria to incentivise innovation in that area.

The funding that does exist is largely channelled towards start-ups in the reproductive health space – fertility, menopause, hormone health, and sexual wellness.

This ignores the number of conditions in which women experience vastly different risk factors, or that women can respond differently to certain medications than men.

Take cardiovascular health, which is plagued by misdiagnosis for women, or the fact that despite having a longer average lifespan, women live in poorer health than men.

There’s also the risk of women’s health becoming a ‘women’s issue’. Any start-up innovating in the health space (and beyond) needs to be acutely aware of gender differences, as well as differences across ethnicity and socio-economic background.

It’s also important to note that, to understand health, you need to have a much wider picture of social, economic, and environmental determinants of health. Improving health services is not enough to improve health at a population level.

The job to be done is clear—and it’s a mammoth task. Health providers and governments cannot tackle it alone.

With the right funding mechanisms and a deeper understanding of layers of problems that are steeped in women’s healthcare, progress is promising.

Olivia Brooks is an investor at the London-based venture capital company, Founders Factory.