Women’s Health Moves From the Margins to the Mainstream

From menopause programs to hormone-tracking wearables, a wave of innovation is reshaping women’s health — even as gaps in care and clarity persist

Women’s health has had a busy few years. What began as frustrations around previously taboo topics like periods, perimenopause and pelvic floors has evolved into a broader shift across fitness, healthcare and consumer technology.

In 2026, the category is far from niche. Fitness brands are publishing research, wearable companies are building models trained on female biology and retail shelves increasingly reflect demand for products that address specific life stages.

The Education Gap Driving Demand

The reckoning in women’s health was driven, in part, by a longstanding education gap that still shapes how consumers experience care. According to O Positiv’s State of the Vagina report, only half of women were taught about periods before they had their first one, and 96 percent couldn’t identify the basic phases of their own menstrual cycle. Sixty-eight percent don’t trust their OB-GYN.

Dr. Karen Toubi, a board-certified OB-GYN and vulvovaginal specialist and advisor to VSL Probiotics, sees the downstream effects in her practice.

“Too often, care is only reactive, arriving after a problem rather than before one,” she said. “I always tell my patients that proactive care is the best care.”

She frames the issue as not just one of awareness, but of infrastructure. Without a baseline understanding of hormonal health, women are more likely to delay care, normalize symptoms or struggle to advocate for themselves. As Dr. Roxanne Pero, an OB-GYN and member of O Positiv’s Medical Advisory Board, noted, these details are not “extra,” they are often the key to faster diagnosis and appropriate treatment.

That gap has created an opening; as traditional healthcare systems continue to fall short on preventative care, adjacent industries, particularly fitness, are stepping in to fill it.

Fitness & Wearables Step In

Fitness and wellness has long been positioned as a proactive lever for health, but brands are now putting data behind that claim. 

Peloton’s collaboration with Respin Health produced one of the more substantive real-world data sets on exercise and menopause: a 60-day study of 267 members aged 40 to 65 found that 84 percent reported overall improvement in menopause symptoms. Fatigue, brain fog and memory issues improved by 26 to 41 percent on average, while sleep quality increased and daily sitting time dropped by 30 minutes.

The study’s principal investigator, Dr. Elizabeth Knight, described the findings as a real-world confirmation of what clinicians have long suspected but rarely been able to quantify at scale.

Pvolve has taken a parallel approach with its Menopause Strong Plan, developed alongside Dr. Jessica Shepherd, chief medical officer at Hers. The six-week program is built around a clinical reality that is often overlooked: muscle loss can reach up to 8 percent per decade after age 30, a rate that accelerates during menopause. The plan layers progressive strength training, mobility work, functional cardio and pelvic floor training to directly address those changes.

From Tracking to Personalized Care

The clinical gap remains significant. Fewer than one-third of OB-GYNs are trained in menopause care, leaving many women to navigate symptoms with limited guidance or inconsistent support.

On the wearables side, the category is shifting from passive tracking to interpretation. Oura’s large language model for women’s health, developed under the guidance of Dr. Tanvi Jayaraman, is designed to analyze a member’s biometric data including sleep, stress, activity and cycle data, rather than returning generic responses.

“Women’s health is too complex, and too often overlooked, to rely on one-size-fits-all systems,” said Dr. Ricky Bloomfield, Oura’s chief medical officer.

The model spans the full reproductive health spectrum, from early cycles through menopause, and is specifically designed to be non-dismissive, helping users better understand patterns in their own data and arrive at clinical conversations more informed.

That shift toward contextualized data is showing up across platforms. Whoop has expanded its women’s health offering with a specialized blood biomarker panel, adding 11 female-specific markers and layering lab testing on top of continuous wearable data. Women are also one of the company’s fastest-growing segments, with 150 percent year-over-year growth, reflecting demand for more personalized insights tied to hormonal health.

New integrations are also connecting previously siloed data streams. Mira and Oura recently partnered to combine lab-grade hormone testing with daily wearable metrics like sleep, readiness and temperature, allowing users to better understand how hormonal changes show up in day-to-day performance and recovery.

At the same time, companies like Maven Clinic are embedding AI directly into care delivery. Its new orchestration layer is trained on more than a billion data points across fertility, pregnancy, postpartum and menopause, allowing it to guide care based on real-world outcomes rather than generalized information. In a category where research shows AI tools fail to provide adequate guidance for a majority of women’s health queries, that level of clinical integration is becoming increasingly important.

Clair, a wearable built by Stanford graduates Jenny Duan and Abhinav Agarwal, is taking a different angle. The company came out of stealth earlier this year with what it describes as the first non-invasive continuous hormone tracker, using a 10-biosensor stack and 500 biomarkers to monitor estrogen, progesterone, LH and FSH in real time.

The premise targets a longstanding limitation in consumer health tech. Most wearables were built on male-centric data or rely on predicted cycles that assume every woman follows a regular pattern. Clair’s models are trained specifically on female biology, including conditions like PCOS, endometriosis and anovulation that affect millions of women but have been systematically ignored by standard tracking tools. The device is expected to launch later in 2026, with a companion app currently in beta.

Eli Health is addressing a related problem from a different angle: hormone testing that doesn’t require a lab. CEO and co-founder Marina Pavlovic Rivas built the company around the recognition that hormones fluctuate constantly and that a single blood draw offers only a snapshot. Eli’s saliva-based Hormometer tracks free cortisol, progesterone and testosterone in real time, with free cortisol offering a more accurate reflection of symptoms like sleep disruption, mood changes and fatigue.

As more tools emerge to track and interpret hormonal data, the supplement category is evolving alongside diagnostics and increasingly moving into mainstream retail. Resbiotic, whose resW Perimenopause Postbiotic targets the Gut–Hormone Axis, is expanding from roughly 1,200 retail doors to nearly 4,200 this spring through Walmart and Walgreens.

Retail, Supplements & The Scale Question

Dr. Toubi sees this as an industry inflection point.

“There’s been a cultural shift toward normalizing conversations around topics that were once stigmatized, like vaginal health, menopause and sexual wellness,” she said. “In response, major retailers are prioritizing carrying women’s health supplements that actually target these issues.”

Her caveat is that scale has outpaced clarity. The space is crowded, with roughly 4,000 women’s health supplement products currently on the U.S. market.

“Women’s health is not one-size-fits-all, because our symptoms aren’t,” she said. “And yet many products are marketed as universal solutions without acknowledging the complexity of hormonal cycles and life stages.”

Within that shift, newer brands are also rethinking how products map to life stages. Biologica, a women’s health brand from Allbirds co-founder Joey Zwillinger and co-founder Liz Zwillinger, launched with stage-specific, beverage-based formulations designed for the reproductive years, perimenopause and postmenopause.

“I have always struggled with my hormonal health and how my hormones were impacting my mood and how I was showing up for my family,” Liz Zwillinger told Athletech News. “I was mixing different pills and powders and it all felt completely disaggregated. I couldn’t find one solution that met me where I was in my hormonal stage.”

Personalized products for women’s current cycle are similarly on the rise. Women’s health brand Vira sells personalized products tailored to each menstrual phase, like cycle-syncing tea. Similarly, workouts and recipes on TikTok that are tailored to each phase have also increased in popularity, with women increasingly cognizant of how their hormones are impacting their needs. 

A Cultural Shift Gains Momentum

The cultural shift is playing out beyond products and platforms. On February 23, comedian Whitney Cummings delivered a public, satirical eulogy for the word “midlife” inside Vanderbilt Hall at Grand Central Terminal, part of Hone Health’s Death to Midlife campaign. Grounded in research showing a disconnect between how people experience aging and how it is described, the event gave a stage to rethinking the framing of later stages of life. 

Even areas like pelvic floor health, long overlooked by most, are now entering the mainstream conversation. Issues that were once ignored or quietly managed are now being given a stage, driven by consumer demand, social platforms and new products entering the market.

“Historically, women’s healthcare is hyperfocused on fertility, pregnancy and life-threatening conditions,” said Lauren Barker, founder of Uresta. “In 2020, only 5% of global R&D funding was allocated to women’s health, 4% dedicated to female cancer, and 1% to all other women’s health conditions.”

Pelvic floor health is also beginning to follow the broader shift toward at-home, data-driven care. kGoal, a connected pelvic floor training device, brings guided exercises and real-time biofeedback into the home, extending care beyond the clinic.

“Pelvic floor dysfunction is incredibly common, but access to consistent, ongoing care can be challenging,” said Brian Krieger, co-founder of kGoal. “Progress depends not just on clinical visits, but on what happens between them.”

These shifts point to a broader change in how women’s health is being approached. Across fitness, wearables, clinical care and consumer products, the category is moving away from one-off solutions and toward more continuous, personalized models of care.

“There are now hundreds of millions of views for pelvic health on TikTok alone, proving that women are hungry for information their doctors aren’t providing,” Barker said. “What’s missing isn’t interest. It’s support that actually meets women where they are.”