Why Women’s Health Became a Billion-Dollar Blind Spot in Capital Markets
Why women’s health remained overlooked for decades, how incomplete data created market blind spots and why investors are finally paying attention.
There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from realizing the system is functioning exactly as designed. Not malfunctioning or broken but just calibrated around assumptions so deeply embedded that most people no longer notice them.
A few years ago, a health diagnosis sent me into the healthcare system in a way I had never experienced before. The moment itself was not dramatic. It was just a conversation in a doctor’s office that left me unsettled.
What unsettled me was not the diagnosis itself but was the realization that many of the treatment options being offered for a condition affecting millions of women still felt strangely primitive and almost medieval.
I remember sitting there thinking: how is this possible?
We live in a world of genomic sequencing, robotic medicine, and billion-dollar biotech platforms. Entire industries are being rebuilt around precision technology. Yet for many conditions that affect enormous numbers of women (as I would later come to find out), the innovation curve often seemed to flatten somewhere decades earlier.
At first, I assumed I simply did not know enough. So I started reading....and reading....and reading.
The deeper I went into the research, the stranger the disconnect became. For decades, women had been routinely excluded from clinical trials. Drug dosing frameworks were often calibrated on male biological baselines. Symptom recognition models were built around how disease presented in men. Entire diagnostic systems treated the male body as default and the female body as variation.
The consequences were not abstract. They shaped everything from cardiovascular outcomes to autoimmune disease recognition to how pain was assessed, studied, and treated.
Then I started asking a different question why hasn’t capital fixed this?
Because capital fixes things. That is what it does, when it is correctly allocated. It finds unmet need, prices the risk, funds the solution. Markets are imperfect, but they are not indifferent. When a problem this large (affecting hundreds of millions of people, with documented economic consequences running into the trillions) remains this underserved, the reason is not that no one noticed. The reason is structural.
Something in the architecture of how we identify opportunity, how we evaluate risk, how we build conviction has produced a systematic blind spot.
I had spent two decades inside that architecture. And I began to understand that the same forces that excluded women from clinical trials for decades had done something else that no one was writing about clearly: they had created pattern-recognition failures in capital markets.
When you omit half the population from the foundational research, you don’t just create knowledge gaps. You create mispriced assets. You create exits that don’t get modelled. You create categories that sophisticated investors walk past because the mental models they’ve built don’t have a place to put them. That was not a health story. That was an investment thesis.
Every time I spoke to an investor who was curious about women’s health, I received the same question in slightly different forms.
Where do I start?
How do I evaluate these companies?
What does good look like here?
The case studies were scattered. The frameworks that worked in enterprise software or consumer fintech didn’t translate without modification. The risk profiles were different, the regulatory pathways were different, the exit landscape was different and no one had assembled the map. I kept thinking: someone needs to write the book I wished I’d had at the beginning of this. Eventually it became clear that I was waiting for someone who was perhaps not going to arrive. So I wrote it.
What started as curiosity slowly became obsession….then responsibility. The book was written in airport lounges between meetings. On late nights after work. In highlighted studies spread across my desk. In voice notes recorded after conversations with founders, scientists, physicians, investors, and women trying to navigate healthcare systems that often did not seem designed around their realities.
Some chapters came easily. Others took months because I was trying to articulate something I could feel intuitively but had not yet fully learned how to name.
How do you explain that one of the largest growth markets in healthcare was hiding inside incomplete data?
How do you explain that a category dismissed for years as “too niche” may ultimately become one of the defining healthcare investment opportunities of the coming decades?
How do you explain that the issue was never simply women’s health itself, but the invisible assumptions underneath the systems evaluating it?
Over time, the book became something larger than I originally intended. Not just an argument about healthcare, but a framework for seeing blind spots differently.
One of the unexpected gifts of this process has been realizing how many people around the world were quietly asking similar questions.
Women trying to understand why their symptoms were dismissed for years.
Founders building solutions while hearing repeatedly that the market was “too small.”
Investors sensing opportunity but lacking the mental models to evaluate it confidently.
Healthcare professionals frustrated by systems that seemed reactive instead of preventative.
The conversations started connecting across countries, industries, and disciplines. Which is why, when I thought about launching this book, I knew the first event could not simply be local. The people who shaped this thinking are everywhere, around the world.
In two days, on May 26th, The Billion Dollar Blindspot will stop belonging only to me. There are two things I am asking for on launch week, and I want to be direct about why each one matters.
The first is a pre-order on or before launch day. The e-book is available for pre-order and costs $9.99. Pre-order concentration in launch week is how Amazon’s algorithm decides what to recommend to people. Bestseller status in launch week is not vanity. It is the only distribution infrastructure that I cannot reach without your help. If you have been waiting to order, this is the moment.
The second is the virtual launch event on May 26th. This is a 60-minute conversation about the book, the thesis, and where the capital moves next with some of the founders included in this book. Registration is free. I would like you to be there.
Sometimes the largest opportunities are hidden not because the data is missing, but because the people interpreting the data were trained not to see it. That is what this book is about. And it is almost in your hands.
On 27 May, I’m hosting a private conversation with some of the people who have lived this arc; operators who have built and exited in women’s health, and an investor who has backed multiple companies in the space. We will be talking about what it actually takes to build in this category, what the reimbursement and adoption curve looks like from the inside, and where the capital opportunity sits right now.
It is not a panel. It is a practitioner conversation and the kind that usually happens behind closed doors. If you want to be in the room, you can request an invitation below.
Disclaimer & Disclosure
This content is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute financial, investment, legal, or medical advice, or an offer to buy or sell any securities. Opinions expressed are those of the author and may not reflect the views of affiliated organisations. Readers should seek professional advice tailored to their individual circumstances before making investment decisions. Investing involves risk, including potential loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
I pre-ordered Kindle version! Thank you!!
Thank you for writing about this, it saw it pop up on my screen and clicked on it right away!