The Quick Read
- Working Women’s Health extends far beyond reproductive health. WHO now explicitly frames women’s health across the entire life course. That includes cardiovascular disease, mental health, chronic illness, disability, violence, ageing and conditions that have historically been underdiagnosed or understudied in women.
- WHO/Europe’s 2026 mortality analysis found that women are living longer but spend more years with chronic illness and disability. Among women aged 45+, recorded causes of death are around 14% more likely than men’s to fall into ill-defined categories.
- The health gap overlaps heavily with working life. McKinsey Health Institute estimates that women spend about 25% more time in poor health than men, with more than half of that burden occurring between ages 20 and 70.
- Work can amplify health pressures through long hours, stress, unsafe or inflexible conditions and occupational risks, while unpaid care adds another layer. The ILO says gender-responsive workplace health policy needs to account for the different work, social roles and risks women experience.
- Better women’s health is not only a conversation about employee benefits. It affects participation, absence, retention, leadership continuity and economic output. Closing the global women’s health gap could potentially add US$1 trillion annually to the economy by 2040, according to McKinsey and the World Economic Forum.
I have an impressive collection of appointments I intend to make
The dentist. The gynaecologist. An eye test that I have been threatening to book since my glasses began requiring a small strategic adjustment on my nose.
A proper blood panel.
The ache that is probably nothing. A fatigue that is definitely because I slept late. The sleep problem that exists because I am tired.
You know the system. Nothing is serious enough to interrupt Tuesday.
And Tuesday, for a working woman, is very difficult to interrupt. There are deadlines. Calls. School messages. Parents. Groceries. People asking where something is while standing approximately three feet from it. Someone needs a document. Somebody else needs dinner. The washing machine has developed an emotional problem.
Meanwhile, your own body keeps sending notifications. Working women’s health often operates like an inbox we have become excellent at marking “read later”.
That thought echoed even more after reading a new World Health Organisation story with a beautifully provocative title: More than a mother.
WHO/Europe examined women’s mortality and asked what happens when health systems become exceptionally attentive to women around reproduction but comparatively less curious about the woman before, after and beyond motherhood.
I read it first as a mother. Then as a working woman. Then simply as a woman who would quite like to remain alive and reasonably functional for the parts of her life that do not involve producing, raising, supporting, feeding, mentoring or emotionally stabilising somebody else.
That last woman may need more attention.
We became very good at asking women one health question
Are you planning a family?
Healthcare understands this question rather well.
Periods lead towards fertility. Fertility leads towards pregnancy. Pregnancy leads towards maternal care. Maternal care leads towards postpartum health.
These things deserve enormous attention. Pregnancy and childbirth remain major health events, and WHO/Europe notes that more than 3,500 women in its region still died from maternal causes between 2018 and 2022 even though nearly all maternal deaths are preventable.
But motherhood is an episode in a woman’s health history. Even when it is a magnificent, exhausting, identity-altering episode, it is not the biography.
WHO now describes women’s health as a life-course issue, encompassing physical and mental health from adolescence into older age. Cardiovascular conditions, mental-health conditions, noncommunicable disease, violence, chronic illness and ageing belong in the conversation alongside reproductive health.
This sounds obvious once written down. Curiously, it has taken healthcare systems, research programmes, workplaces and sometimes women ourselves a long time to behave as though it were true.
I have known women who will not miss a paediatrician appointment but will postpone their own health check for 6 months. Women who can recite their parents’ medicines but have no idea when they last checked their iron levels. Women who know everybody’s allergies, everybody’s vaccination schedules, and everybody’s dentists. And then say something charmingly vague about themselves: “I should probably get that looked at.”
We are excellent family health administrators. Our most unreliable client is often us.
The working woman has another talent: Looking fine
There is a peculiar professionalism to being unwell at work.
You rarely arrive at a meeting and announce: “Good Morning. My hormones are staging a coup, I slept four hours, my pelvic pain is dreadful and my ageing parent called twice during the commute.”
You say: “Morning! Shall we start?”
Women have learned to translate health into workplace-acceptable language.
- Endometriosis becomes “a bad day”.
- Migraine becomes “slightly under the weather”.
- Menopause becomes “I didn’t sleep very well”.
- Anxiety becomes “a lot going on”.
- A miscarriage becomes annual leave.
- A fertility appointment becomes “a personal commitment”.
- A mammogram becomes something wedged between two calls.
- Pain is rescheduled.
- Fear is rescheduled.
- Preventive care is rescheduled.
- The PowerPoint is rarely rescheduled.
That is one reason the phrase “women’s health at work” should mean much more than just sanitary products in the washroom.
Our earlier reporting on the Humm Care Women’s Health & Workplace Report found that 89% of the youngest women surveyed reported that health concerns affected their productivity. In comparison, 58% of respondents had either left or considered leaving a job because of inadequate caregiving or childcare support.
That is what health looks like when it passes through an employment contract. It becomes concentration. Attendance. Confidence. Travel. Promotion. Stamina. Career continuity.
Whether you put your hand up for a bigger job. Whether you can still tolerate the job you already have.
Our bodies do not know that 3.30 PM is inconvenient
I am increasingly fascinated by how completely modern work assumes the body will remain professionally discreet.
Please sleep at the correct time.
Menstruate without operational disruption.
Become pregnant according to policy.
Recover within the leave period.
Do not develop chronic pain during a product launch.
Schedule menopause outside the leadership years.
Age elegantly, preferably after retirement.
The body has ignored the memo.
Perimenopause can begin precisely when women are reaching senior leadership.
Endometriosis frequently affects women through decades of active work.
Cardiovascular risks rise as women age.
Musculoskeletal problems, migraines, autoimmune conditions, mental-health pressures, sleep disorders and chronic illness do not politely queue behind annual appraisals.
Our own piece on menopause and working women examined the awkward timing of midlife health changes: they often arrive when women are managing teams, running businesses, and carrying significant professional responsibility.
Likewise, endometriosis in working women showed how chronic pain can follow a woman into meetings, travel and deadlines long before anyone at work has any idea what she is managing.
These are often discussed as separate women’s health “topics”. The woman experiences them as Tuesday. That is the difference.
And women live longer. Hooray. Sort of.
Women tend to outlive men. The media and publications usually present it as excellent news, and obviously the alternative lacks appeal.
But longevity is a fairly blunt health metric.
WHO/Europe’s latest analysis makes a more complicated point: women are living longer, but often spend more of those additional years living with chronic disease and disability.
McKinsey Health Institute’s global analysis puts another number around the disparity. Women spend, on average, about 25% more of their lives in poor health than men. More than half of the health gap occurs during the working years, roughly ages 20 to 70.
So congratulations, ladies. We may get more years. Some assembly required.
This matters because adding years to life and adding healthy life to those years are very different accomplishments.
A 78-year-old woman managing osteoporosis, arthritis, cardiovascular disease, frailty and the lingering economic effects of a disrupted working life is technically evidence of longevity. She may not describe herself as a triumph of the health system.
WHO’s point is precisely that health policy must focus more on women’s health span, not merely on reproductive survival and life expectancy.
For working women, I would extend that argument.
We should care about career health span too.
- How many years can a woman work with energy, mobility, confidence and adequate health?
- How long can she remain economically independent?
- Can she age into leadership without chronic health problems forcing her to have a smaller professional life?
- Can she earn enough healthy working years to build retirement security?
These are health questions. They are also power questions.
There is something deeply strange in the way women’s deaths are recorded
This was the statistic I still cannot stop thinking about.
WHO/Europe found that women aged 45 and above are around 14% more likely than men of the same age to have their cause of death classified as ill-defined. Categories can include things such as frailty, heart failure, cardiac arrest, unspecified dementia or simply an unknown cause.
Some of this is understandable. Women live longer, and advanced age often means several health conditions coexist, making a single cause difficult to identify.
But WHO points towards another concern too.
Women can experience delayed diagnosis, receive less investigation and remain underrepresented in some areas of clinical research. Cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death for both genders, can present differently in women and may therefore be under-recognised.
There is an unsettling symmetry here.
Women spend a lifetime saying: “It’s probably nothing.”
Medicine sometimes says: “We’re not entirely sure.”
Then mortality data says: “Cause unspecified.”
I am being deliberately flippant because otherwise the implication is rather grim.
Better diagnostic precision is not paperwork. If we misunderstand how women become ill and why women die, we fund the wrong research, train doctors using incomplete patterns and design prevention around an inaccurate picture.
Being counted properly is part of being cared for properly.
The office wellness programme cannot fix medical science
I have attended enough workplace wellness conversations to know how quickly complicated health problems can end up beside a fruit bowl.
Wellness Wednesday. Yoga. Mindfulness. Ten thousand steps. Hydrate. (Please do hydrate. I have nothing against water.)
But if the fundamental issue is that women’s conditions are under-researched, symptoms are overlooked, care is difficult to access and jobs are designed around bodies with uninterrupted capacity, a webinar on resilience has limited jurisdiction.
WHO says historical gender bias in research, data and healthcare design has contributed to gaps in understanding how diseases present in women and how treatments affect them.
The International Labour Organisation makes a parallel point about work. Occupational health systems have often overlooked the fact that women and men can perform different kinds of jobs, carry different social responsibilities and encounter different physical and psychological risks. Effective prevention, therefore, requires gender-sensitive information rather than assuming a single standard worker.
This is what we meant when Change in Content examined healthy workplaces for women in 2026. A genuinely healthy workplace cannot be built on the assumption that fairness means pretending that every employee has an identical body and life.
Equality does not require HR to become a gynaecologist. Everyone will be relieved to hear that. It requires companies to stop making health unnecessarily difficult.
So what should a workplace actually do?
I would begin with something unfashionably practical.
Make healthcare usable
An impressive insurance policy is less impressive when the relevant specialist is out-of-network, preventive checks are inconvenient, or outpatient consultations require a small administrative thesis.
Women need health benefits they can actually use. That can include preventive screening; accessible primary care; gynaecology and endocrinology; mental health support; musculoskeletal care; menopause support; fertility care, where appropriate; and confidential access to specialists.
Not every company can provide every benefit. Every company can ask whether the benefits it buys correspond to the people it employs.
Stop demanding a medical performance
A woman should not need to appear dramatically ill for flexibility to be considered legitimate.
Health conditions fluctuate. Pain fluctuates. Menopause symptoms fluctuate. Migraines arrive. Treatment schedules exist.
Managers need enough discretion and education to handle ordinary health realities without turning every accommodation into an investigation.
Treat prevention as productivity
Working women are extraordinarily talented at delaying routine care because nothing is currently wrong enough.
Employers can make preventive checks easier through paid health time, access to screening, and benefit design.
If McKinsey’s estimate is even directionally correct, closing women’s health gaps could add up to US$1 trillion annually to the global economy by 2040. Around 80% of the estimated economic impact sits within working ages. That does not mean women should be kept healthy because GDP would appreciate it.
Sometimes economics is simply the language required to convince the room.
Design work around reality
Flexible work. Predictable scheduling. Safe transport. Reasonable workloads. Proper rest. Ergonomics. PPE designed for women’s bodies in industrial settings. Temperature control where feasible. Clean toilets. Private spaces. Return-to-work pathways.
None of these is as exciting as launching a wellbeing app. Several may be considerably more useful.
Care is also health, even when nobody submits it to insurance
There is another working-woman health story hiding outside clinics. Caregiving.
The ILO estimates that 708 million women worldwide were outside the labour force in 2023 due to unpaid caregiving responsibilities.
The women who remain in work do not magically stop caring. They become extremely talented at concurrency.
- Work meeting while monitoring a parent’s test results.
- Presentation after school drop-off.
- Hospital call from an airport.
- Medication ordered between emails.
- Dinner planned during commute.
The body absorbs the logistics. That is why discussions of burnout around women often become frustratingly individual.
Sleep more. Exercise. Set boundaries. Meditate.
Fine. Who will take Amma to the cardiologist at 11? The advice industry becomes considerably quieter at that point.
Our piece on overwork culture and women examined what happens when professional availability sits atop unpaid domestic and emotional labour.
A woman’s health does not live in a separate room from the demands placed on her.
Any serious health conversation must include time.
- Who owns hers?
- Who interrupts it?
- Who assumes it is available?
- Who receives care from it?
- And what remains when everybody has taken their share?
Working women’s health: Mothers may recognise this particularly well
Motherhood does something peculiar to medical attention. For a while, a woman’s body becomes extremely interesting.
Measurements. Supplements. Scans. Questions. Appointments. Advice from professionals, relatives and one neighbour who appears to possess a postgraduate degree in everyone else’s pregnancy.
Then the baby arrives. The camera turns: How is the baby feeding? Sleeping? Growing? Pooping?
The woman is still there, usually bleeding, sore, sleep-deprived and wondering which part of herself belongs where now.
Maternal health must remain a priority. But WHO’s “more than a mother” framing landed with me because the phrase captures something beyond medicine.
Women themselves can absorb the idea that our health matters most when somebody else’s wellbeing depends on it.
Stay healthy for your children. Look after yourself for your family. Take care of yourself so that you can take care of everyone else.
Very sweet.
May I stay healthy because I enjoy being alive? Can that be enough?
And what about the woman who never became a mother?
She deserves an entire healthcare imagination too. It is one reason reproductive framing can quietly narrow women’s health.
A woman may not want children. May be unable to have them. May have chosen not to. She may have lost pregnancies. May be single. May have built a life in which motherhood never appeared.
- Her health remains female health.
- Her ageing matters.
- Her heart matters.
- Her bones matter.
- Her mental health matters.
- Her sexual health matters.
- Her occupational health matters.
- Her mortality matters.
We should be able to construct a women’s health agenda in which motherhood is deeply important without making it compulsory to the narrative.
By midlife, something else happens: Everybody thinks we are managing
Midlife women often look exceptionally competent from a distance.
Careers established. Children older, perhaps. Parents ageing. Finances more complicated. Leadership responsibilities larger.
Maybe menopause. Maybe divorce. Sometimes, bereavement. Maybe all of it arriving in the same financial quarter because life has no respect for sequencing.
It is also when the risk of chronic disease becomes more important.
WHO’s latest analysis emphasises cardiovascular conditions, musculoskeletal disorders, dementia and other chronic conditions affecting women’s later-life health.
Our menopause coverage made a related workplace point: women reach midlife carrying valuable professional experience precisely when symptoms, sleep disruption, and health changes can begin to make the existing workplace model harder to navigate.
Perhaps workplaces need to stop treating health support as something mainly relevant to young mothers.
The woman running the division may need it more than anybody realises. She is simply better at hiding the evidence.
I don’t want women’s health to become another job for women
It is important. There is a danger in every empowering health article. It gives us 12 more things to do.
Book the screening. Track the symptoms. Walk ten thousand steps. Sleep eight hours. Eat protein. Lift weights. Meditate. Hydrate. Monitor blood pressure. Understand hormones. Advocate at the doctor. Know your family history.
Excellent. I shall add these directly beneath “buy coriander”.
Women do need health literacy and agency.
- We should know our bodies better.
- Ask questions.
- Get second opinions where needed.
- Understand basic preventive care.
- Stop normalising pain that requires investigation.
But closing women’s health gaps cannot become another self-improvement project for women.
- Health systems have responsibility.
- Medical research has responsibility.
- Governments have responsibility.
- Employers have responsibility.
- Families have responsibility.
- Men have responsibility.
The person already carrying the problem should not receive the entire action plan.
I would like workplaces to learn a new question
For years, organisations have asked whether women can work. That question is increasingly settled.
Then came: Can women lead? Also settling nicely, despite occasional institutional confusion.
Perhaps the next useful question is: Can women remain healthy enough to have the full working lives they are capable of having?
Not endure. Not stay employed while privately falling apart. And not leave the office, begin unpaid shift number two and consider exhaustion a personality trait.
- Remain well.
- Well enough to grow.
- Well enough to take risks.
- Well enough to lead.
- Well enough to earn.
- Well enough to enjoy what they have built.
That feels like a much more ambitious definition of workplace inclusion.
The much-needed Change in Content: I want the years. I also want to feel alive inside them.
There are many things about getting older that I am beginning to appreciate.
I care less about certain opinions. I say no faster. And yes, I own better shoes. I have finally accepted that nobody has ever truly enjoyed a networking breakfast at 7.30 AM.
Age has its advantages. I would quite like to arrive at the later decades of my life with something else too: health.
Not perfect health. Human bodies have their own plans. But the best health that knowledge, prevention, medical care, decent work and a little luck can reasonably provide.
WHO’s latest work asks us to see women beyond motherhood and to examine health across an entire life. That perspective belongs in workplaces too. Because a woman does not stop being a body when she badges into the office.
- She does not stop ageing when she becomes senior.
- She does not stop needing care because she is excellent at giving it.
- She does not become a collection of reproductive organs until 45 and a vague collection of chronic conditions afterwards.
- She is one person. At 23; at 38; at 51; at 74.
The same woman, accumulating work, stories, scars, expertise, people, grief, promotions, laughter, responsibility and years.
I am a mother. I am a working woman. The emergency contact for many people. And I am exceptionally good at remembering everyone else’s appointments.
But there is one identity I intend to become slightly more unreasonable about protecting. Mine.
Editorial Note
This Sunday Read is a first-person editorial reflection inspired by WHO/Europe’s August 2026 data story More than a mother: a deep dive into women’s health and mortality. The WHO analysis covers its 53-country European Region and uses mortality data primarily through 2022; its findings should therefore not be treated as India-specific mortality estimates. The article’s discussion of the wider health gap and workplace observations draws on research from the WHO, the ILO, and the McKinsey Health Institute/World Economic Forum. Personal passages are editorial narrative and should not be read as medical guidance. Readers experiencing symptoms or health concerns should seek advice from an appropriately qualified healthcare professional.
Sources
World Health Organisation Europe — More than a mother: a deep dive into women’s health and mortality: WHO’s August 2026 analysis of women’s mortality, diagnosis, ageing and life-course health.
World Health Organisation — Women’s Health: WHO’s global overview of women’s physical and mental health across the life course.
International Labour Organisation — Gender and Occupational Safety and Health: ILO guidance on why occupational health needs to account for sex, gender, work patterns and social roles.
McKinsey Health Institute & World Economic Forum — Closing the Women’s Health Gap: Research estimating the health and economic cost associated with women’s additional years lived in poor health.
International Labour Organisation — Unpaid Care Work and Women’s Labour-Force Participation: Global estimates of the impact of unpaid care on women’s participation in paid work.
