From the persistence of the gender health gap to the blurred lines between innovation and over-promising in the wellness market, Euroconsumers’ event with The Nine made one thing clear: access to reliable information remains a major challenge.
Many products target women but too often without the transparency, evidence, standards or regulation needed to build real trust.
When half the global population’s bodies are an industry target, who ensures that health claims are scientific, products are safe and women have all the facts?
Euroconsumers’ recent event in collaboration with The Nine in Brussels posed this question to an expert panel of Morgane Leten, Ffion Storer-Jones and Pinuccia Contino all about the expanding women’s health and wellness market.
Women’s bodies have become some of the most powerful engines of global consumer spending. From menstruation and pregnancy to postpartum recovery and menopause, entire industries have been built around the biological realities that billions of women will experience.
But the structures designed to safeguard and support these consumers have not kept pace. And despite progress in gender equality, the mindset of many designers and marketers remains anchored in ingrained assumptions and biases which limit true innovation.
Products sold to women offer everything: relief, optimisation, balance, confidence, youth, performance. Wrapped in polished marketing and persuasive language and then amplified by social media influencers, the result is a constant cascade of promises that often rest on shaky foundations.
We asked participants about the regulatory and scientific gaps that persist in this market and what can be done to close them so that women can trust that products are grounded in solid science, transparent proof and responsible regulation.
Morgane Leten is Co-founder of Guud, a women’s health brand focused on menstrual health which offers clean label supplements, expert support and safe community discussion. support by experts and a safe community.
She called out how the regulatory reality which has different standards for food and supplement products makes for some very confusing health messages:
A chocolate spread brand (main ingredients: sugar and palm oil) can tell you on their website that it ‘sparks your enthusiasm to start the day positively’. A mood claim. For a sugar product.
Meanwhile, as a supplement brand backed by experts and a lab in Belgium we can’t tell a woman that magnesium may help with menstrual cramps. We can’t say that vitamin B6 may support PMS symptoms. For omega-3 we are only allowed to say ‘brain health’.
Morgane Leten, Co-founder of Guud
Ffion Storer-Jones works on women’s health issues at global development organisation Deutsche Stiftung Weltbevölkerung (DSW). She reflected on the underfunding of sex and gender responsive research and innovation which has led to a wider gender health gap at the EU and other jurisdictions.
Pinuccia Contino, Deputy Director and Head of Unit Gender Equality, in the Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers at the European Commission added that the underrepresentation of women in clinical trials is not just an academic gap. It results in devices, medicines and diagnostics are not adapted to their bodies and needs.
As well as less attention in research, Ffion also shared just one example of the discrepancies in how seriously regulatory and standards processes take women’s issues:
We have ISO standards for almost everything from paper sizes to screw threads, but did you know there are no globally agreed safety standards for menstruation products?
Ffion Storer-Jones, Deutsche Stiftung Weltbevölkerung
Both identified social media as a significant part of the problem. Powered by algorithms and personal data, influencer sales are based on exploiting people’s insecurities and appealing to questionable ideas on what a woman’s body and life should be.
Morgane felt the lack of accountability for the loudest voices on social media drowned out and penalised brands that were developing evidence-based, female-centered products.
Ffion said that start-ups face another barrier from the censoring of women’s health information on platforms which hinders them from accessing investment and scaling up. The group CensHERship is campaigning against large platforms systematically taking down posts about women’s sexuality or sexual health whilst letting the male equivalents stay online.
After sharing insights on the challenges in the current women’s health and wellness market and how it, the discussion shifted to what could build more empowered consumption, so that women could become central to decisions about how they want to support their bodies and minds.
Participants were asked: what would it take for women to make choices about their bodies in markets designed not only to sell to them, but to serve them?
For Pinuccia Contino, empowerment is key to equality:
I wish to stress two tenets that, in my view, are critical to reaching true Gender Equality: empowerment as the essence of impactful action, and inclusiveness, because gender equality is a win-win business in every sense.
Pinuccia Contino, Deputy Director and Head of Unit Gender Equality, DG JUST
Fion welcomed the ambition and cross-sectoral approach of the EU’s new Gender Equality Strategy which as well as addressing employment, technology and gender-based violence has specific goals to enhance women’s health.
It’s really crucial now as the EU decides what it funds under its next long term budget that women’s health is included; with a focus on a comprehensive approach to funding sex and gender responsive R&I and dedicated funding for neglected areas of women’s health, like menopause.
Fion Storer-Jones, Deutsche Stiftung Weltbevölkerung
This is an economic fairness issue too:
All genders contribute to the public purse, and we should be equally as well served by innovations in technologies and in health care that are being advanced by public funding.
Fion Storer-Jones, Deutsche Stiftung Weltbevölkerung
In the marketplace, Morgane wanted much more support for the smaller, serious and transparent brands who were building female-focused businesses and products with a smarter regulatory system and more accountability for the brands with bigger budgets making outlandish claims.
Finally, the panelists were asked about the one thing they would recommend people who wanted to empower themselves more as women in the health and wellness market:
This was a really honest conversation about the business of women’s bodies and the gap between marketing claims and scientific evidence, and what it actually takes to build consumer trust.
Women are frequently the focus of new wellness products, yet many offerings arrive with little clarity, limited evidence, and almost no consistent standards or oversight—making genuine confidence hard to build.
Let’s make a change that empowers women by building markets designed not only to sell to women, but to serve them.
A huge thank you again to our speakers and everyone who joined.
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