Closing The Gender Health Gap

Women’s Health in many markets is considered to be in crisis with experts calling for a fairer system that works for everyone. It is a fact that women live longer than men but experience more years in poor health, according to health experts who are underlining an urgent need for action to boost women’s health. Investment addressing the women’s health gap could add years to life and potentially boost the global economy by $1 trillion annually by 2040, claims a recent McKinsey report.

So is the world closer than ever to closing the women’s health gap? Creative Salon sat down with Weber Shandwick Health and health marketers to discuss what can be done to change the classic definition of women’s health, raise the stakes and ultimately drive action and better health outcomes?

It's been well documented that males have been the default in research and clinical trials; that women’s health conditions and needs—like endometriosis and contraceptives—are underfunded and under-researched; and women’s health continues to face huge gaps in research, education, funding, and innovation. So how are businesses and countries turning their attention to this underserved aspect of medical research and committing to closing the women’s health gap? What is the role of health marketers in helping close this gap? Where are we seeing progress, and how can brands and businesses track their own journey in supporting women better?

A roundtable of health experts discussed these issues and share how brands are trying to solve some of the unmet needs in women's health. The participants in the round table included:

• L Jasmine Kim – head, Care@Home, US Digital Health – Samsung Electronics America

• Claudia Calori – VP, head of global marketing, Personal Health Philips

• Marci El-Deiry – VP, global business unit leader, Mother & Child Care, Women’s Health Philips

• Jessica Canton – brand manager, Canesten Brazil and LATAM Bayer

• Daria Costantini – brand manager, Canesten UK and Ireland, Bayer

• Rachel Pay - president Health EMEA & APAC integration lead at Weber Shandwick

• Jamie Dowd - president, Health, Americas at Weber Shandwick

• Damini Khosla - managing director at Weber Shandwick, Switzerland

• Laura Schoen - chief healthcare officer, Weber Shandwick

The wide-ranging discussion on women's health considered the solutions and progress in answering some of the questions, and also the role of marketers in taking on the responsibility of not just sell products but also to influencing change.

There are some sobering lessons to be learned here and it puts women at the heart of health.

"I want to be looking at women's health from a place where women are the chief health officers of the world - they care for themselves, their family and the community."

L Jasmine Kim, head of Care@Home, US Digital Health, Samsung Electronics America

Creative Salon (CS): We know that 80 per cent of healthcare spend is by women and yet women feel poorly understood by health marketers; five per cent of healthcare research and innovation today is invested in female-specific conditions; two-thirds of UK women feel that their health problems are “not taken seriously”. Let’s discuss some of the initiatives your businesses are involved in are trying to solve these unmet needs in women’s health and make a positive change.

Daria Costantini: Our brand Canesten has launched a new UK iteration of the ‘Vagina Academy’ as part of our wider goal to help set people free from shame and discomfort to talk about intimate health conditions. We live in a world where porn is readily available on the internet, yet many young people don’t know the first thing about what kinds of infections there are or even what the vulva is supposed to look like, and we want to address that.

Jessica Canton: The idea is simple - let’s start to move imagery of real vulvas away from a sexualised depiction and into an informative, educational space to equip young people with the essential information they need to better understand their bodies as well as normalise conversations. And let’s talk vagina and vulvas, but without any shame attached. The knowledge gap around women’s health is huge, especially in this scenario, information is power. So our main goal is to empower women with knowledge so they can take informed decisions about their bodies.

L. Jasmine Kim: I want to look at women's health from a place where women are the chief health officers of the world - they care for themselves, their family and the community. So, for every business that should be the starting point. Women as a specific cohort of focus are a very recent focus for Samsung, and what we’ve been looking at is sleep. Sleep disturbances are one of the most common and disruptive symptoms in menopausal women, but not enough is known about the causes, and current sleep aids are often ineffective. We’ve teamed with Bayer to carry out an observational study on sleep disturbances during menopause (SDM). The aim is to understand more about the burden and impact of SDM using data provided by women.

Marci El-Deiry : At Philips, we started with the thinking that we needed to evolve the brand for women and make it about pre-conception pregnancy as well as postpartum and expand on product into solution. So, one of our big solutions is Pregnancy +, the world''s largest pregnancy app. A woman downloads it every three seconds, globally and we've had 70 million downloads in the last 10 years. We see this app as a platform, not just for content or community but also as a force for good in the healthcare system, as in helping make policy changes. For example, in the US, we've partnered with the state of Michigan to offer our premium app solutions to all their Medicare consumers. In India, we partnered with a startup to talk about Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS).

Claudia Calori: I really like to think about women as the epicentre of care. So, we’re using products like our baby products range, Philips Avent, to highlight a narrative around topics that are crucial for women's health. We’ve launched the new #ShareTheCare brand positioning and movement for Philips Avent, calling on families, friends and communities to help moms and all new parents share the care, so they can prioritise their well-being and self-care to provide the best care for baby. The new positioning is backed by research, revealing that moms often feel guilty spending time on 'me' – almost half of moms (44 per cent) are under pressure to 'do it all'. If we collectively change our behaviour and attitude, we can make a real difference.

Damini Khosla: We recently worked on an award-winning campaign for menopause in emerging countries, which was really interesting. For those of us sitting in the West, we think that we see and hear menopause all the time today. But if you go to countries like India, it's still not being spoken about. But low symptom recognition, social stigma and fear mean over half won't speak to their doctors about what they're going through. And of course, my personal experience of being born and brought up in India and bringing this campaign together has been hugely rewarding.

Jamie Dowd: What I’m most proud of is a programme called ‘Just Say Vagina’ that was built out of two premises. Firstly, being women, we are very apologetic always when it comes to our health in general, but specifically reproductive health. And then secondly, nobody talks about the actual body parts. This work - which believes it is time for women to stop apologising for who they are and what they want - is for the modern age birth control Annovera and has already scooped several awards.

Laura Schoen: Let’s not forget women are not only patients and caregivers, but gatekeepers and influencers who can help improve outcomes and change the way we deal with multiple challenges. With Rachael [Pay] and her team dedicated to addressing gaps in research and public understanding of women’s health conditions, that’s what I’m most excited about.

Rachael Pay: When we launched The Weber Shandwick Collective: Women's Health, we introduced our proprietary tool, which is called the Women's Health Indicator, looking at thousands of data points across policy, advocacy, media to better understand where the gaps are when it comes to women’s health. We've run the indicator through a number of client assignments, including Alzheimer's disease (AD) - which is highly prevalent in women (twice more prevalent in women than men) but poorly diagnosed. Women are mostly spoken to as caregivers, not as people who are living with AD and there’s very little information bespoke to women or policies that address the needs of women. We've done some interesting work in the area of climate change and its impact on women's health and have several other projects live that look at the gender disparity in HIV and mental health and women.

CS: Those are some fascinating examples of all the work that you are doing on women’s health. But how do you even begin to influence and drive change in a world where men have been the default in health?

Jessica Canton: I come from Brazil, and work in that market. So as marketers we have to bring our personal experience to bear and come up with solutions. In Brazil, we don’t learn about intimate or sexual health in schools. Therefore, we’re surrounded with misinformation and taboos when it comes to women’s health. So, the idea of the Vagina Academy was to create a digital school where you can learn everything about vaginal health. But the biggest surprise for me was when TikTok - our main social media channel - censored our content. On a lot of social media platforms you can name male body parts, but female body parts are censored. So how can I teach someone if I cannot even say the words? So, we started having discussions with some of these platforms.

Daria Costantini: What's interesting about the Vagina Academy programme is that it was originally designed for countries like Brazil or countries where you think there's a need for change. I look after the UK market, which might be perceived as quite an advanced country, yet we face exactly the same issues here, if not worse. We discovered similarly that in the UK only six per cent of women learn about intimate health at school or university. And the implication of that is significant, when you realise that a majority of women in the UK avoid going to see their GP or are too embarrassed to talk about intimate health or show their vulva and are therefore not getting the help that they desperately need. And we realised quite quickly that this initiative isn't just for countries like Brazil or Mexico.

In the UK, we launched a new iteration of this campaign called ‘The Truth, Undressed’ - teaching the reality of how our bodies look and behave. We’ve funded the development of lesson plans and also work with government bodies to try and make intimate health education mandatory. The programme includes a dedicated educational microsite and social media awareness videos created by Canesten, plus free, comprehensive lesson plans that have been developed in collaboration with the national body The PSHE Association, which teaches 11–18-year olds about vulval and vaginal anatomy and health. It’s also available for the first time as a UK national curriculum resource.

When we started this whole programme, we thought we were just going to educate about vaginal and intimate health. But it became a series of 23 different topics, starting with basic female anatomy because there was so very little information about women’s health.

CS: You are all commercial businesses and also the ones helping solve some of the challenges around the inequities and health where men have been the default for too long. What do you see happening within your own organisations to help address this?

Claudia Calori: As brands and businesses, we have a voice. And powerful voices. So, let’s start using our voices to speak up about women’s health - not only as taboos - but also provide more information. As brands and as marketers it is a moral imperative. We know that working together as an industry, we can elevate the conversation in engaging and creative ways. That is how we address this gender health gap.

L. Jasmine Kim: Also, as marketers, if you really want your board to listen - use data, use numbers. Women have outstanding consumption power, are the primary decision-makers in their families and will generally outlive men. That’s our starting point in trying to change attitudes, both internally and externally, towards so-called taboo women’s health topics.

Daria Costantini: We’re the second most visited website after the NHS for women's health and we see a wide spectrum of ages of women coming and desperately looking for information, because 90 per cent of those women's journey starts online.

As marketers it’s our responsibility not just to sell products but also to influence change. I’m not saying it’s easy. But the more we’re standing for something bigger than just selling products, the better it is for our consumers and also for the businesses that we work for. The more you build affinity and brand equity, the more it equals brand power, equals market share, equals business growth.

Marci El-Deiry: Also remember, it takes one success story to blow it out of the park. Take our Pregnancy+ app for example. The state of Michigan is offering pregnant and postpartum residents access to an app that provides information on foetal development and personalised health recommendations. So now we are talking to New York because it’s a domino effect on who you can impact and the improvements and outcomes you can affect.

CS: What collectively can the marketing and advertising industry do to change the classic definition of women’s health, raise the stakes and ultimately drive action and better health outcomes?

Daria Costantini: It takes a village, as we know, and it will ultimately take all stakeholders to come together to impact real change. Let’s start with partnerships - just like what Weber Shandwick is trying to do with all its clients - bringing together like-minded brands who share similar values when it comes to women’s health. And as we push and challenge this agenda, visibility is key. We must go mainstream, as women’s health comes with so many taboos and misinformation - with even social media not clearly recognising what is porn and what is education. So, we need to continue talking about this publicly.

L. Jasmine Kim: And let us not underestimate the power of creativity - which can allow us to break taboos and ignite a conversation on difficult topics.

Daria Costantini: Award winning work works, because suddenly you have a voice. And we don’t enter awards for the sake of our ego. We did it because we knew that it would lead to talkability. And we desperately need it to elevate all the conversation around the women’s health category. Also, as a brand, let’s remember to have some purpose beyond just selling the product. And I mean really meaningful and authentic purpose. In our case, we needed to free people from shame and that is what all our communication around our brand has been. And then what are you going to do with that? What is it that you want to really change? But know that change takes time. But yes, the power of the collective really matters as we have big questions to answer when it comes to women’s health.

Rachael Pay: Creatively there’s a big job to be done. We need to ensure work resonates with women who are ultimately 53 per cent of the world’s population. We need the industry to rally hard. We need to consider women’s health as a category for award recognition and we need to raise the bar on what good looks like when it comes to health and women.