Women's health businesses don't just face cultural stigma. They face structural financial discrimination.
A new report from advocacy group CensHERship and investment portfolio The Case for Her, drawing on 14 months of research across the UK and Europe, reveals how outdated banking classification systems and institutional discomfort create concrete barriers for legitimate femtech and sexual wellness companies.
"Founders in women's health often face compounding disadvantages—cultural stigma, social taboo, institutional misclassification from service providers, and the funding and research gaps that sit alongside these, too,” Cristina Ljungberg, co-founder of The Case for Her, told BeautyMatter. “While the issues will be more or less intense depending on where a founder is based, the underlying issue here is global—that systems don't know how to categorize women's health without seeing it as 'risk.'"
With women's health tech receiving an estimated 8.5% of digital health investment and just 2% of venture capital (VC) is allocated to female founders, what does systemic change actually look like?
The lack of capital investment doesn’t exist in isolation. Layer in banking misclassification and the persistent gender data gap, and the disadvantages multiply at every stage.
The women’s health gap describes the systemic neglect of women’s health needs, in research, funding, and clinical attention, relative to the actual burden women experience. Closing the gap could add the equivalent of seven healthy days to every woman’s life, each year, according to McKinsey.
The World Economic Forum estimates that addressing the women's health gap represents an annual $1 trillion opportunity to the global economy, yet it receives only 6% of private healthcare investment. Female-specific conditions—uterine fibroids, adenomyosis, endometriosis, urinary incontinence, and menopause-related problems—account for 14% of the women's health gap but attract just 1% of R&D funding. Women are diagnosed four years later than men, even when they are being treated for the same diseases, and spend nine years more of their lives in poor health, with that burden falling not at the end of life but across their reproductive years.
For example, endometriosis affects one in ten women of reproductive age, but between 2019 and 2023, companies creating solutions for the condition received $44 million in investment, compared to erectile dysfunction (ED) startups, which attracted over $1 billion. Though ED treatments benefit both partners in a relationship, the investment gap persists even when accounting for conditions that affect both sexes. Diabetes, which contributes just 2% of the women's health gap, receives 12.5% of total healthcare funding, while female-specific conditions contribute 14% and receive 1%. Every $1 invested in women's health yields $3 in economic growth, yet the inequality persists.
Beyond capital, women's health faces a $60 billion gap that VC alone cannot close, according to Forbes. Structural shortfalls are embedded in how the sector is classified, measured, and funded at every level.
For women's healthcare founders, the barriers begin long before a pitch deck is opened.
CensHERship and The Case for Her’s The Bias Burden report documents how outdated classification systems, over-compliance, and cultural discomfort combine to create structural barriers for women's health companies. The startups it interviews (HANX, Perifit, Mestrualia, Ove Care) are legitimate healthcare businesses being misclassified alongside firearms and tobacco because words like "vagina" and "menstrual" trigger the same automated alerts as high-risk products. The bias is not ideological. It is algorithmic.
Alexandra Fine, co-founder and CEO of sex-toy company Dame, intimately knows the cost of that bias precisely. When New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority refused to run Dame's ads for pleasure products while erectile dysfunction ads ran freely in the same system, the Brooklyn-based brand spent three years and $450,000 fighting it in court. They won. "It shouldn't have required a lawsuit," Fine told BeautyMatter. "That's not a strategy gap. That's a policy gap based on gender."
"A company can scrape together capital, build a product, and find demand, and still get stalled by account closures, payment restrictions, inflated fees, or insurance barriers," Anna O'Sullivan, co-founder of CensHERship and founder of FutureFemHealth, told BeautyMatter.
A 2026 survey by Small Business Britain and Starling Bank found that 44% of female entrepreneurs had never received financial education, a gap that’s compounded when those same founders are navigating opaque banking systems designed without them in mind.
Fine notes that as Dame scaled into Walmart, Sephora, and Target, banking and payment processing became more manageable. Its retail presence changed how financial institutions assessed the business. “The bias didn't disappear. It shifted,” the CEO said.
Those barriers extend beyond banking into e-commerce platforms and app stores, where anatomical language, period education, and fertility content are routinely flagged as inappropriate, limiting reach and deepening the commercial disadvantage at every stage. The issue has reached the British Parliament, but legislative recognition has yet to translate into structural change.
The Center for Intimacy Justice's 2025 report estimated annual revenue losses of up to $5 million per company due to Meta's removals and restrictions on women's health content alone.
Jackie Rotman, founder and President of the Center for Intimacy Justice, told BeautyMatter that women's health founders struggle to raise capital when societal taboos are baked into our financial systems and technological systems. “The miscategorization of women's health content as inappropriate on big tech platforms contributes to barriers to funding, as big tech platforms are gatekeepers of marketing and distribution,” she said.
Women-owned health companies in biopharma face an average valuation discount of 41% at early stages and 52% at late stages, compared to the broader healthcare sector. All-female founding teams raised $3.2 billion in 2025, down 22% year-over-year, despite female-founded companies showing better survival rates, lower burn rates, and generating 24.9% of all US venture exits that year. Women account for 60% of US healthcare spending ($2.1 trillion annually) and make roughly 80% of household healthcare decisions, yet 82% of VC decision-making roles at US firms with over $50 million Assets Under Management (AUM) are held by men.
Ljungberg is direct about what that means in practice: "You can't operate if you can't open a bank account, process payments, or secure business insurance—and for many women's health companies, that's the reality long before they ever pitch for VC funding. What CensHERship's research shows is that this isn't isolated; it's a systemic issue in how women's health is still classified and understood."
"The misclassification risk is real for women's health founders, and this can directly impact timelines, costs, and ultimately whether innovation reaches people. As an investor, you do need to consider whether a company can function within existing systems. That's why tackling the root cause of these barriers is so critical," she continued.
When women raise at lower valuations and exit at higher ones, the returns flow to investors, not founders. Fine is clear about what follows: Iif the people best positioned to understand and improve women's lives can't access capital on equal terms, women's health doesn't get equal investment. “That's a capital allocation problem, not a values problem," she added.
"There also needs to be accountability around what I'd call female-washing in this space;. bBrands that market themselves as women-first but were actually seeded and controlled by men. The founding story matters. Who actually has decision-making authority matters," Fine continued.
In March 2026, the Chicago Journals published an article that introduced the term "investment feminism." It describes the phenomenon in which financial actors position investment as a lever for gender equity, while the structures that determine who receives that investment remain unchanged.
Funding is one issue; systemic blindness in how women’s health is tracked and understood is another.
In 2025, women's health generated $27 billion in acquisitions and IPOs—the largest year on record. Most of those transactions were classified in databases as diagnostics, oncology, or medical devices, not as women's health. The category is generating returns that the systems recording those returns cannot see.
Women's health investment topped $2.6 billion in 2024, a 55% year-over-year increase, expanding to $10.7 billion when you include conditions that disproportionately affect women. Yet fragmented care pathways and delayed diagnosis persist across every life stage. The argument that the sector simply needs more capital misses the point. What it needs is infrastructure.
This disparity is also seen in AI models. Research by MIT’s Jameel Clinic found that GPT-4, Meta's Llama 3, and healthcare-focused Palmyra-Med all recommended lower levels of care for female patients. The models are trained on data that defaults to male, demonstrating how discrimination is being encoded into the next generation of diagnostic tools.
According to Rotman, 85% of women's healthcare founders who have sought to fundraise believe digital suppression has directly damaged their ability to do so. While companies in men's health were able to advertise freely from their earliest years, driving exponential growth curves that satisfy Series A and beyond investors, women's health companies with equivalent teams, markets, and needs have been restricted to linear growth. The bias doesn't just limit visibility. It limits fundability.
For O'Sullivan, the gender data gap is the deepest structural problem because “it distorts what gets studied, diagnosed, reimbursed, and built in the first place.”
If systemic change took place, women's health could save up to $1 trillion annually by improving productivity and reducing healthcare costs, according to the McKinsey Health Institute. But the road to get there is still paved with classification errors, data gaps, and systems never designed with women in mind.
Change is coming, but it’s taking place in policy rooms and accreditation frameworks before it reaches founders' bank accounts.
In March 2026, the Women's Health Visibility Alliance formally launched, bringing together Essity, Clue, Hertility, Daye, Mooncup, and Dr. Aziza Sesay to challenge systemic bias in how women's health content is moderated and classified across digital platforms. The same month, CensHERship was invited to the UK’s House of Lords twice for Women's Health Strategy discussions, and cited in Parliament’s Women and Equalities Committee report on menstrual health, with a dedicated section on shadowbanning and a call for it to be addressed in the Women's Health Strategy refresh. The Case for Her took CensHERship's findings to the 39th Policy & Coordination meeting of the UN's Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction in Geneva, calling for enforcement of equal access across very large online platforms.
"Although Meta added language to multiple global corporate advertising policies in the months following our 2022 investigation—to state more examples of women's sexual and reproductive health ads that Meta states are allowed—in practice, we saw that Meta continued to reject sexual and reproductive health ads serving women and people of underrepresented genders,” Rotman said.
In 2016, Stripe publicly acknowledged that its restrictions on sexual wellness businesses were "outdated and overly moralizing." A decade on, the gap between stated policy and practice remained.
The next step is accreditation. Femtick, launching later this year, is designed to recognize financial and commercial infrastructure providers actively building fair access for women's health companies, covering banking, capital access, payments, underwriting, and risk management.
"The opportunity is for first movers in this space to set the tone that women's health is not an exception or a reputational risk, but a normal part of the modern health economy," O'Sullivan said.
For Ljungberg, Femtick is a shift in the terms of the conversation: "From problem to setting a new standard. Most providers aren't deliberately excluding women's health companies; they are operating within outdated frameworks and with a lack of knowledge and understanding of the sector. Femtick gives them a clear pathway to engage with confidence and align with a recognized benchmark."
The measure of success, she said, will be practical. "Are companies opening accounts without unnecessary friction? Are payment blocks being reduced? Are founders reporting less time navigating these barriers? If we can start to see this shift, even if incrementally, then that's when you know the infrastructure is beginning to move.”