The Health System Wasn’t Built for Them, So Women Are Building Their Own

As health marketers, we spend countless hours zeroing in on our target audiences and target communities. We are trying to identify unfiltered truth that we can use to deliver solutions through the products we market.

Yet, we are often overlooking the reason why there are communities built by the patients themselves. Especially for female audiences, these communities form to fill the "experiential gap” – the void between clinical literature (often grounded in studies that historically prioritise men) and what women are actually looking for. While clinical data is often presented in sterile language sparsely used by patients themselves, women are looking for the lived experience of conditions and life stages they are experiencing.

In research Weber Shandwick partnered with Reddit, we confirmed that women are actively seeking what symptoms will actually feel like (61 per cent) and what is normal versus concerning (55 per cent).*

In the past, between doctor visits, women navigated their health through hushed conversations with friends and late-night visits to Dr. Google and WebMD. The era of Dr. Google is fading and being rapidly replaced by Reddit and LLMs.

Today, content (and symptom) discovery decreasingly starts with a traditional search engine, unless that search yields a generative AI response (thanks, Google/Gemini!). Instead, content discovery and symptom searching happens across a fragmented, cross-referenced web: social feeds, DMs from friends, LLM prompts, conversations with friends and family, doctor visits, and the anonymous, unfiltered conversations on Reddit.

To better understand this behavior, we at Weber Shandwick partnered with Reddit and surveyed 886 U.S. women and their partners to explore how women are navigating their health. From the frustrating delay between symptom onset to endometriosis diagnosis to the perplexing earliest signs of perimenopause, women are searching for safe spaces to ask vulnerable questions without judgment.*

Redditors are finding this radical transparency in anonymous forums and communities online. Our research revealed women who use Reddit are more comfortable discussing their bodies on anonymous forums (81 per cent) than with their own friends and family (72 per cent).*  

Anonymity offers a safe space for raw, unfiltered conversations with peers who have lived it first.

Across the Croisette at Cannes Lions Festival, I participated in closed-door conversations around the slow pace of clinical change to the peer-to-peer ways women are taking control of their own health. Women are entering doctor’s offices more prepared to describe their experiences thanks to their deep, community-vetted knowledge.

This is a powerful shift. The brands that will win in this new content discovery ecosystem will understand that we need to focus on earned attention and meeting women with empathy, lived-experience validation, and radical transparency in the spaces the conversations are already happening. We owe it to patients to listen to what they are already sharing and to finally meet them where they are.

To download our full research report, please visit Weber Shandwick’s Women’s Health page.

* Source: Weber Shandwick and Reddit, The New Health Ecosystem: Decoding the Modern Women's Health Content Discovery Journey, April 2026.

Kathleen Hunter is Weber Shandwick EVP, Client Experience.