One day, we won't need to call it "women's health"
Giulia Paggiola at WHH
In my PhD days in Sustainable Industrial Chemistry, we used to say: one day, we won't need to call it "green" anymore — it will just be how chemistry is done.
Last week, at WHH Women's Health Horizons, I found myself saying a version of the same sentence about a very different field: one day, we won't need to call it "women's health" — it will just be how healthcare is done.
It's a strange thing, watching the same pattern play out twice, a decade apart, in two fields that have almost nothing else in common. But movements follow a shape. And once you've seen that shape once, you start recognising it everywhere.
The shape new movements take
Every emerging field needs a label before it can grow. A name to rally under, a way to say "this deserves its own budget line, its own conference, its own course." Green chemistry needed that label in the 1990s. Femtech needed it in 2016, when Ida Tin — co-founder of the cycle-tracking app Clue — coined the term to describe a category of health innovation that, until then, simply didn't have a name investors or regulators recognised.
And then the label does its second job: it becomes a target. Niche. Unnecessary. A trend, not a discipline. The evidence gets waved away with the same tired lines. Job listings stay thin, because nobody's quite sure the field is going to last.
Green chemistry went through exactly that phase. So is women's health, right now.
What happened to "green"
Fast forward from those PhD conversations, and the picture looks nothing like the scepticism we were used to. Chemical regulatory affairs, CMC and sustainability roles are no longer a hard sell — they're a growth area. REACH compliance isn't optional anymore for manufacturers of finished products, medical devices included. And regulation, which used to be seen as the thing slowing green chemistry down, is now widely credited as one of its biggest accelerants — pushing companies toward safer solvents, lower-carbon processes and fewer single-use materials, largely because the cost of not adapting has become higher than the cost of change.
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)'s own account of its green chemistry programme is a good illustration: two decades of substituting safer reagents and adopting continuous manufacturing produced measurable waste reductions and productivity gains. I was proud to be part of the Green Chemistry Unit at GSK and help drive both grass-roots and top-down initiaves that had real impact.
"Green" didn't stay a niche. It became the baseline expectation for doing chemistry responsibly. Nobody asks a formulation chemist anymore why they care about REACH.
Where women's health is right now
Women's health is earlier in that same arc, and the numbers show it. The global market opportunity is enormous — PwC puts the addressable women's health market above $600 billion — yet funding still lags dramatically behind the size of the problem. Multiple 2026 investor reports put women-specific health companies at roughly 2–4% of total healthcare venture funding, even after a genuinely strong year of capital inflows. Galen Growth's 2025 femtech report described a "$360 billion opportunity" still largely untapped, calling women's health a "ghost market" — visible in the data, barely visible in the capital allocation.
That gap is exactly what green chemistry looked like before REACH gave it regulatory teeth and economic logic met the mission. The tools are similar, too: better clinical evidence standards, dedicated regulatory pathways, investors willing to underwrite the unglamorous infrastructure work, not just the consumer apps.
The parts that don't map neatly
But somewhere the analogy strains. Green chemistry is, at its core, a materials and process problem — hard, but bounded by physics and chemistry. Women's health carries physiological, social, economic and regulatory complexity layered on top of centuries of research that simply excluded female bodies from trial design. Closing a data gap that deep takes longer than swapping a solvent. I don't think the timelines will match. But the direction of travel — from stigmatised niche to unremarkable norm — is the same, and that's the part worth holding onto.
Riding the wave
At WHH, the theme this year sat at the intersection of climate and health, which is what let me draw this line between two parts of my own career I don't usually put in the same sentence. It also meant a room full of people — clinicians, founders, regulatory specialists, investors — thinking about the same structural problem from different angles at once. That's usually a good sign that a field is about to move.
So: let's ride this wave while it's swelling, and push it as far as it'll go. Women's health won't need a label forever. Let's turn it into the mainstream.
Further reading
Jones Day — The Future is FemTech: Innovation and Investment in Women's Health
Duane Morris — Why Women's Healthcare Deserves a Place in Your Fund's Portfolio
PwC — From Margin to Mainstream: The Future of Women's Health
Pfizer — Green Chemistry: A More Sustainable Approach to Medicine Development
Methodology note: This article is based on my original LinkedIn post (link), reflecting our professional experiences and personal perspectives. AI assisted in elaborating the topic into a broader article by integrating personal notes, literature research, fact-checking and deeper insights on the topic. All analysis and regulatory perspectives are our own, and all content has been reviewed for accuracy.
