What Happens When 150 Women Walk Into a Room: Scotland's First All-Day Women's Health Event.

Published: 2025

We did it. Scotland's first all-day women's health event — around 150 women walking through the doors of Bettii Presents, spending a full day learning about everything from pelvic health and bone strength to periods, stress, and menopause.

I learned an enormous amount myself. Some of it was practical and immediately life-altering — I discovered, to my genuine dismay, that red wine and carbonated drinks are bad for your bones. (I had given up the red wine a while ago, only to replace it with a beloved SodaStream habit. You cannot win them all.) The evidence-backed takeaway for bone health, if you want it: favour white wine over red, go easy on the fizzy drinks, eat your cheese, and get your walking shoes on.

But beyond the individual nuggets, the day was about something much bigger.

Why this event needed to exist

This was about creating a bigger conversation in Scotland — a greater focus on women's health, on women's health research, and on the new solutions that have long needed to exist or evolve in this space.

The women's health gap is not only a gap in outcomes. It is a gap in attention, in funding, in research, and in the simple provision of spaces where women can learn about their own bodies from people who know what they are talking about. Women's health has been chronically underfunded and under-researched, which means that even highly educated, health-conscious women often reach adulthood — and middle age — without a clear understanding of how their own bodies work.

An all-day event dedicated entirely to women's health is a small intervention against a very large gap. But it matters, because it creates permission, community, and knowledge all at once.

Understanding bodies that work differently

One of the themes of the day was a simple but underappreciated truth: women's bodies work differently to men's, and we need to create the time and space to genuinely understand them.

This sounds obvious. It is not reflected in how most of our health information, workplace policies, or financial products are designed. The default has been to treat the male body as standard and the female body as a variation to be managed — which is exactly how you end up with the research gaps, the misdiagnoses, and the systems that do not fit.

In a world that is busier and more stress-inducing than ever, learning how to look after your body is one of the most valuable life hacks available. That was the spirit of the day: educational, empowering, and holistic — engaging women in their own health rather than talking at them.

Thank you, and what comes next

Events like this do not happen by themselves, and the behind-the-scenes reality of doing it for the first time is honestly indescribable. Enormous thanks to the women I worked alongside to pull it together — Elaine Galston, Eleanor Morris, Natalya Ratner, and Rachel Flynn Charters — and to every woman who attended and made it what it was.

But I do not want it to be a one-off. Scotland can and should do more for women's health. I would love to build from here — to create an environment that supports and encourages innovation in this space, to invest in it properly, and to have genuine cross-sector conversations about funding, research, and solutions.

The appetite is clearly there. 150 women in a room on a single day proved that. The question is whether we build the infrastructure to meet it.