Women’s Health: A Story of Two Halves

Last year, I left Cannes Lions with a persistent question: if we can galvanise the industry around women’s sport, why can’t we do the same for women’s health?

In 2024, standing ovations for campaigns celebrating female athletes demonstrated our industry’s extraordinary power to reshape cultural narratives. Through 2025, we began to see greater creative momentum around women’s health, including Bayer’s “Nothing But Normal” and Essity’s breakthrough campaign “Never Just a Period” pushing the conversation forward. And yet, women’s health was nowhere to be seen on the Croisette unlike women’s sport in the previous year and neither did it scoop any top award – the little blue pill for erectile dysfunction firmly took the Grand Prix. Women’s health featured lightly in the main Festival programme, often positioned as niche or secondary, rather than the urgent global priority that it is.

Women’s health is not simply a gender equity issue. It is an economic imperative. When women are healthy, economies grow - families thrive, societies function. That tension became strikingly clear in early 2026. At the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, the most influential healthcare investment gathering in the world, discussions centred on M&A, the strategic evolution of GLP-1s, and the expanding role of technology. Women’s health barely registered.

There was not a single main stage session dedicated to it, and even in satellite events, it remained peripheral.

Two days later, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the picture was markedly different. Women’s health emerged as a visible, cross-cutting theme across health, investment and economic growth discussions. It was not framed as a “gender gap” issue, but as a global growth opportunity. Investors, pharma leaders and venture funds discussed women’s health alongside AI, climate and macroeconomic strategy.

The disconnect between the world’s largest healthcare investment conference and one of its most powerful economic forums is telling. Women’s health is simultaneously marginalised within healthcare and recognised as a macroeconomic opportunity on the global stage. It is, quite literally, a story of two halves.

For healthcare communications and creative agencies, this moment matters. When an issue sits in strategic limbo is it core or is it niche? Momentum stalls. And when momentum stalls, the consequences are not theoretical.

On World Cancer Day, 4 February, a sobering projection was shared: without a coordinated global framework for ovarian cancer, eight million women could die from the disease by 2050. Ovarian cancer remains one of the deadliest gynaecological cancers, often diagnosed late and discussed too little. In the UK alone, more women die each year from ovarian cancer than from all other gynaecological cancers combined.

The silence surrounding this disease is not accidental; it is structural. Recent analysis from the World Economic Forum shows that women’s health receives just 6 per cent of private healthcare investment.

Among the top 100 global pharmaceutical, medtech and diagnostics companies by revenue, only a minority demonstrate meaningful activity in women’s health, and even fewer position it as a distinct commercial or R&D priority.

And this is precisely where our industry becomes critical. We are the translators of complexity. The architects of cultural momentum. The ones who turn evidence into urgency and urgency into action. Organisations such as the World Ovarian Cancer Coalition are generating the data, building the frameworks and advocating tirelessly for change.

But data alone does not shift systems. Stories do.

There is also a responsibility that sits uncomfortably close to home. The creative industries remain disproportionately male-led. That reality presents not criticism, but an opportunity. Male allyship in this space is not about saviourism but it is about stewardship. It is about ensuring that briefs, budgets, boardrooms and award juries reflect the scale and seriousness of women’s health challenges. It is about moving beyond performative support toward shared accountability.

We proved, through women’s sport, that when the industry aligns behind a cause, culture moves. Investment follows attention. Attention follows creativity. The question is no longer whether women’s health deserves that platform. It is whether we are prepared to build it.

If we want to be the industry that shapes the future of health, not just celebrates it, then women’s health cannot remain a sidebar conversation. It must become central to the stories we choose to tell, and the growth we choose to enable.

Ahead of International Women’s Day, which marks the third anniversary of Weber Shandwick’s Women’s Health Initiative, let’s consider what the scale of the problem truly is and what our role as a creative industry is in addressing it.

And if anyone reading this fancies coming to our 'Bring a Bloke to Breakfast’ event ahead of IWD on 5 March, message me! We need men working alongside us to drive change in women’s health.

Rachael Pay is president health EMEA & APAC integration lead at Weber Shandwick.