There's a peculiar paradox unfolding in women's health right now. Gen Z women are more informed than ever about their menstrual cycles, cycle syncing, and phenomenon like the "luteal uglies." Simultaneously, women across the UK are traveling between regions for basic reproductive health care because their local systems can't meet demand.
The disconnect isn't accidental. It's a feature of how incentives work in modern wellness.
The wellness industry profits handsomely from educating women about their bodies. Apps, supplements, podcasts, and boutique fitness classes built around hormonal cycles have created an entire ecosystem of premium products. Women pay for this knowledge. They're engaged, informed consumers who read about cycle syncing and understand their hormonal patterns in ways previous generations didn't.
This is genuinely valuable. Women deserve to understand themselves. But here's what troubles me: this knowledge revolution is happening almost entirely in the private, consumer-facing wellness space. Meanwhile, the parts of women's health that don't generate direct consumer revenue are quietly deteriorating.
Women traveling from Wales to London for abortion care isn't a wellness trend. It won't trend on TikTok. No supplement company profits from it. No app gamifies access to reproductive autonomy. So while we celebrate that young women now comprehend their bodies better than their mothers did, we've allowed the infrastructure supporting women's actual reproductive choices to fragment.
The same pattern appears elsewhere. Breast cancer awareness campaigns encourage individual vigilance, which matters. But systemic delays in imaging, screening, and pathology services don't create the same marketing opportunities. A woman checking her breasts at home because a celebrity urged her to is empowered as a consumer. A woman waiting months for a diagnostic mammogram is a system failure that doesn't sell products.
Consider vaccine information in pregnancy. The wellness space has generated enormous debate, content creation, and platform engagement around COVID vaccination and pregnancy. This discourse, whatever one's perspective, demonstrates the industry's capacity to mobilize around topics that capture attention. Yet preventative care in pregnancy, postnatal mental health screening, and maternal mortality reduction receive comparatively little commercial enthusiasm.
The incentive structure is clear: wellness companies reward engagement with quantifiable, purchasable insights. They reward individual optimization. They reward the narrative that women can solve health problems through informed consumer choices.
Real women's health infrastructure—the boring, expensive, unglamorous work of ensuring equitable access to abortion care, timely cancer screening, adequate maternal services, and preventative gynecological care—doesn't generate the same returns. These problems require systemic change, funding redistribution, and policy shifts. They don't create recurring customers or viral moments.
Readers should notice who benefits from this arrangement. It's not women. Not really. Individual Gen Z women benefit from understanding their cycles better. But collectively, women benefit from functioning health systems far more than from optimized wellness consumer products.
I'm not suggesting we abandon wellness education. Knowledge is power, and informed women should absolutely understand their bodies. But we should recognize this knowledge boom for what it partially is: a market opportunity masquerading as a health revolution.
The real test of commitment to women's health isn't whether companies can sell cycle-tracking apps. It's whether we're equally energized about solving the infrastructure problems that force women to cross borders for basic care, that delay cancer diagnoses, and that leave maternal services inadequate.
Until the same enthusiasm, investment, and innovation applied to consumer wellness products flows toward unglamorous systemic problems, women's health will remain selectively informed and structurally unequal.