Women’s health is more than reproductive health

For too long, women’s health has been viewed through a narrow lens.

Periods. Fertility. Pregnancy. Childbirth. Menopause.

These are critical parts of women’s health, but they are not the whole story.

A new analysis from the World Health Organization (WHO) is calling for a broader definition of women’s health, one that looks beyond reproduction to understand women’s health across their entire lives.

Published on 18 August, WHO’s More than a mother: a deep dive into women’s health and mortality examines mortality data across its 53-country European Region. Its message is clear: while decades of investment in maternal and reproductive health have driven important progress, the health of women outside their reproductive years has received far less attention.

We’ve made progress. But our focus has been narrow.

There is good reason maternal health has received significant attention.

More than 98% of births across the WHO European Region now take place in health facilities, and approximately 99% are attended by skilled health professionals. Maternal mortality has also generally declined over the past two decades.

These are significant achievements.

But WHO points to an uncomfortable reality: the majority of women’s deaths occur outside the maternal period.

Women are living longer than ever before, but they are not necessarily living those additional years in good health. Women continue to spend more years than men living with chronic illness and disability.

And yet so much of the way we research, measure and talk about women’s health continues to concentrate on the reproductive years.

As WHO puts it, this focus creates a risk that women are prioritised when they are central to reproduction, while the decades before and after receive significantly less attention.

A woman is more than her reproductive system

Women’s health is cardiovascular health. It’s neurological health. Mental health. Musculoskeletal health. Metabolic health. Sleep, ageing, chronic disease and everything in between.

And these parts of our health don't exist independently of one another.

WHO's analysis highlights the growing burden of chronic disease, disability and dependency among older women, including musculoskeletal disorders, dementia and other neuropsychiatric conditions. These conditions can have an enormous impact on quality of life, yet receive considerably less attention than reproductive and maternal health.

Even cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death for both women and men, can present differently in women and may be under-recognised. WHO points to evidence that women experience delayed diagnoses, are investigated less and remain underrepresented in clinical research, particularly in cardiovascular disease.

This isn't simply a gap in healthcare.

It's a gap in what we know.

When women are missing from the data, they're missing from the decisions

Perhaps one of the most striking findings in WHO's analysis concerns what happens when a woman dies.

Among people aged 45 and over, women are around 14% more likely than men to have their cause of death recorded as “ill-defined.” That can include classifications such as frailty, cardiac arrest, heart failure, unspecified dementia or simply an unknown cause.

Some of this can be explained by women living longer and therefore being more likely to have multiple chronic conditions.

But WHO argues that it also points to a much broader problem.

If diseases in women are under-researched, symptoms are under-recognised and diagnoses happen later, that affects not only the care women receive while they're alive. It affects the health data we collect afterwards.

And poor data has consequences.

It can obscure the true burden of disease, weaken prevention strategies and influence which areas receive research funding and attention. In WHO's words, women risk becoming less visible in both healthcare systems and the data used to make decisions about them.

We need to understand women's health across a lifetime

Closing the gender health gap therefore requires more than adding more reproductive health services.

WHO is calling for more inclusive clinical research, greater understanding of how diseases present differently by sex, more equitable diagnosis, better age- and sex-disaggregated health data, and greater visibility of older women in health statistics.

Fundamentally, it requires us to stop treating women's health as a collection of isolated reproductive events.

Our health is a story that unfolds over decades.

The symptoms you experience today may relate to something that happened months or years ago. Sleep can affect mood. Hormones can interact with metabolic health. Medications can change symptoms. Mental and physical health can intersect. What happens during one stage of life can provide important context for the next.

To understand women's health properly, we need to be able to see that bigger picture.

This is why Ovum exists

At Ovum, we believe women deserve healthcare that understands more than one moment, symptom or stage of life.

Ovum is an intelligent health partner designed specifically for women, bringing the different parts of your health together in one place so you can build a clearer picture of your health over time.

From symptoms, sleep and mood to medications, appointments, lifestyle, medical history and wearable data, Ovum helps you create a longitudinal record of your health, identify patterns and have more informed conversations about your care.

Because women's health is more than our cycles. It's more than fertility, pregnancy or menopause. It's our whole health, across our whole lives.

And the better we understand it, the better we can begin to close the gender health gap.

Source: World Health Organization, “More than a mother: a deep dive into women’s health and mortality”, published 18 August 2026.