Women's Health Issues Are the Canary in the Coal Mine.

Published: 2025

Menopause. Period pain. Fertility challenges. Fatigue.

These are not just personal health stories. They are signals — indicators that show us where the systems we live and work within were not designed with everyone's needs in mind.

I have come to think of women's health issues as the canary in the coal mine. Not because they only matter for women, but because when women experience friction with a system, it very often exposes a deeper design flaw that affects many people who do not fit the original default the system was built around.

The narrow reference point

Most of the systems we operate in — work, healthcare, finance — were built on a narrow reference point. A default user who was, broadly, male, healthy, working full-time without interruption, and experiencing energy and capacity as roughly constant from day to day.

These systems have not evolved as quickly as people's lives and our understanding of human difference have. Not, in my view, through bad intention — but through a combination of insufficient innovation, incomplete understanding, reluctance to change, and short-term thinking.

The results show up everywhere once you start looking. Workplaces that assume energy and productivity look the same every day, for everyone. Healthcare systems where women's health remains under-researched and underfunded, and where solutions too often focus on managing symptoms rather than understanding and addressing underlying causes. Financial systems that do not fully account for caregiving, career breaks, or the long-term financial impact of health conditions.

Why the canary matters for everyone

Here is the crucial point: when women experience challenges with these systems, it rarely stays contained to women.

A workplace that cannot accommodate someone managing a health condition that fluctuates day to day will also struggle to accommodate a man with a chronic illness, a parent with caring responsibilities, or an older worker managing a long-term condition. A healthcare system that dismisses symptoms it does not fully understand will fail anyone whose presentation does not match the textbook. A financial system built around uninterrupted full-time earning will fail the growing number of people — of all genders — whose working lives are non-linear.

The women's health experience is the early warning. It surfaces the gap first, and most visibly, but the gap affects a much wider population.

From problem to design opportunity

This is why I do not think of this as only a women's health issue. I think of it as a design opportunity.

Closing the women's health gap could add at least $1 trillion to the global economy annually by 2040. But the opportunity is bigger even than that figure suggests, because designing systems that genuinely work for women means designing systems that work better for everyone who has been poorly served by the narrow default.

Redesign the workplace to accommodate fluctuating energy and health, and you build something better for a huge range of people. Fund and research women's health properly, and you advance medical understanding that benefits everyone. Build financial products that account for career breaks and caregiving, and you serve the modern workforce as it actually is, not as it was imagined to be decades ago.

The canary is telling us something. The question is whether we treat it as one group's problem to manage, or as an invitation to build systems that work better for all of us. I know which framing I find more compelling — and more commercially serious.