More Data Hasn’t Made Women More Certain

As data becomes table stakes, Herman Scheer is helping women’s health brands move up the value chain — translating insight into trust, clarity and action.

Over the past decade, women’s health has made a clear bet: if women could see more, they could control more.

Track the cycle. Monitor glucose. Measure stress. Quantify recovery. Surface patterns. Deliver insights.

The logic was straightforward, visibility would lead to understanding, understanding to agency and agency to better health outcomes. And it scaled quickly. An entire ecosystem of apps, wearables and diagnostics emerged, all built around the idea that more data would lead to better decisions.

But the outcome has been less clear — a reality Herman Scheer has seen firsthand in its work across women’s health and the broader wellness category.

Women are swimming in data and still guessing. Conditions like PCOS affect up to 13% of women, yet as many as 70% of cases remain undiagnosed. At the same time, nearly 80% of women report that menopause interferes with their daily lives, yet they haven’t been able to work through actionable solutions. The tools have improved and the visibility is there but clarity and confidence in what to do next has lagged.

“The category has become exceptionally good at measurement,” says Herman Scheer’s president, Alison Servi. “What it hasn’t delivered at scale is what the data actually means for a person, and how they should respond to it.”

Because Bodies Don’t Operate in Dashboards

The demand for that data did not come out of nowhere. For years, many women have felt dismissed within traditional healthcare systems, told symptoms were “normal,” “stress-related” or simply part of being a woman. Data became a form of validation — a way to prove what they were experiencing.

And yet, even as the volume of information has increased, the experience of navigating it has grown more complex.

“There is an underlying assumption embedded in many of these tools that the body behaves like a controlled system, where variables can be isolated, inputs measured and outputs optimized,” Servi explains. “But women don’t live in controlled environments. Their bodies exist within the context of work, sleep, relationships, hormonal shifts, stress and life transitions — all interacting, all shaping the very metrics being tracked.”

What the category has effectively done is break something whole into parts that can be measured. The result is precision without clarity.

“We’ve taken something inherently interconnected and tried to understand it in isolation,” she says. “And that creates a gap between what’s being measured and what people actually experience.”

That gap affects not just outcomes, but how women relate to their own bodies.

The promise of these tools was empowerment, yet in practice, it often feels like work. Another dashboard. Another score. Another set of signals to interpret without a clear path forward.

A new kind of fatigue has emerged — not from illness, but from constant self-surveillance. Every data point raises a question: Is this normal? Is this a problem? Should I be tracking this?

“The intention was to give people more control,” says Servi. “But in many cases, it’s created a sense of responsibility without resolution and that’s a meaningful miss.”

Moving Up the Value Chain

This is where the next phase of women’s health begins to take shape.

Measurement is no longer the frontier. It is quickly becoming table stakes and, in many cases, commoditized. The real opportunity lies in what comes next: interpretation, context and action.

“At Herman Scheer, this is the gap we see most clearly,” says Servi. “There’s no shortage of data. What’s missing is the infrastructure to help people understand it in context and actually do something with it.”

That shift is already playing out at the brand level. In working with companies like Myo physical therapy, Herman Scheer has helped reposition offerings in ways that move beyond information and toward real-world application, clarifying what the product is, who it’s for and how it fits into daily life. With functional gum brand Neuro, that same approach has helped expand beyond a niche biohacker audience into a broader segment of health-conscious consumers, translating complexity into something more accessible and actionable.

Herman Scheer sees the next generation of products moving beyond tracking and toward translation — not just showing what is happening, but explaining why it matters and what to do next.

That includes interpretation layers that turn fragmented data into clear guidance, behavioral systems that support follow-through and community frameworks that normalize experiences data alone cannot explain.

There is also a growing role for AI.

“AI has the potential to bridge the gap between information and understanding,” she explains. “Not by giving people more to track, but by helping them make sense of what they’re already seeing.”

Even outside of women’s health, the pattern holds. European-style baby formula company Bobbie saw a conversion rate of a staggering 9.3% soon after the launch of their e-commerce site. The focus was on simplifying the complexity of their products’ benefits and ensuring there was no friction in navigating from homepage to checkout. 

In business terms, this represents a move up the value chain. Measurement can be replicated. Interpretation builds trust. And trust, particularly in women’s health, is where margins live.

This is where Herman Scheer is increasingly playing a role — not as product builders, but as translators between complex systems and real-world use.

Says Servi, “We partner with companies across women’s health to close the gap between insight and action because ultimately, the goal of this category was never just to help women understand their bodies. It was to help them feel and be healthy in them.”