The Health-Wealth Connection: Why Women's Health Is a Cross-Sector Opportunity.

Published: 2024  |  Perspective updated: 2025

My eyes were first opened to the connection between women's health and women's wealth through my work on financial inclusion. I was looking at the gender pension gap — the persistent, structural disparity in retirement savings between men and women — and trying to understand what was driving it. The usual suspects were there: the pay gap, career breaks for caring, part-time working patterns, auto-enrolment thresholds.

And then, the more I looked, the more health kept appearing. Menstruation. Maternity. Menopause. Not as isolated events, but as recurring points of financial friction across a woman's working life. Each one with the potential to reduce earnings, interrupt contributions, and compound into a retirement shortfall that the financial services industry has largely treated as someone else's problem.

I started asking whether the challenges across the health and wealth sectors actually aligned — and whether the opportunity to address them together was being missed.

The size of the opportunity

The numbers make the case.

Women control a growing share of global wealth, projected to reach $93 trillion, driven by increasing workforce participation, entrepreneurship, and intergenerational wealth transfers. That is not a niche market. It is the most significant wealth transfer opportunity of the next generation.

The global women's health market is valued at over $30 billion and growing at an annual rate of over 15% through 2030, propelled by innovation in femtech, mental health, and personalised care. And yet femtech still accounts for just 8.5% of total global digital health funding — a gap that represents both a market failure and a commercial opportunity.

Where the challenges align

What I keep finding is that the barriers facing women in financial services and the barriers facing women in health are remarkably similar.

In both sectors, there are access barriers — driven by cost, by literacy, by the design of current solutions that were built around a default user who was not a woman. In both, there is a gap in understanding and education — women are often less confident engaging with financial products, and often lack the health literacy to understand conditions that affect them every month. In both, existing solutions have not kept pace with the actual diversity of women's needs and life stages.

These are not separate problems with separate solutions. They are expressions of the same underlying issue: systems that were not designed with women fully in mind, in sectors that are beginning to recognise the scale of what that has cost.

The opportunities that follow

If the challenges align, so do the opportunities.

Combined product offerings that address financial and physical health simultaneously are starting to emerge — health insurance products that incorporate women's health benefits, financial planning tools that account for the earnings impact of caring responsibilities, employee benefits packages that treat menstrual health and menopause as legitimate workplace concerns with financial implications.

Femtech and fintech collaboration is an obvious next step that is still underexplored. The data that femtech companies hold about women's health patterns has significant potential value for financial services organisations trying to design products that reflect real life. The financial infrastructure that fintech companies have built could help femtech businesses reach underserved populations who cannot afford premium health services.

Workplace initiatives are another significant lever. Employers who invest in women's health — through flexible working, menstrual health policies, access to care through benefits — are also investing in women's financial resilience. The two things are not separable.

What will drive this

Three forces seem most likely to accelerate the opportunity.

Increasing awareness is creating demand. The conversation about women's health in the workplace has moved from marginal to mainstream remarkably quickly. That creates the conditions for products and services to follow.

Personalisation is becoming possible. The data and technology now exist to design financial and health products that account for life stages and individual circumstances rather than assuming a standard user. Women's lives are not standard. Our products should not be either.

Innovation and leadership are coming from unexpected places. Some of the most interesting work at the intersection of women's health and financial inclusion is happening in markets like sub-Saharan Africa, where necessity has driven solutions that would not have emerged from more comfortable starting points.

The opportunity is real. The question is which organisations — across financial services, health, femtech, and fintech — will build the bridges to claim it.