When at-home fertility kit Béa Fertility listed its product on Amazon, the company was told it couldn’t use the word “vagina” in its product description. The word “semen,” however, was fine. So was “vagina” in listings for male sex toys.
That’s not an isolated glitch. It’s a window into a system-wide problem quietly strangling one of healthcare’s fastest-growing sectors.
“The Bias Burden,” published in February 2026 by advocacy initiative CensHERship and investment platform The Case For Her, documents what the women’s health funding conversation has missed: a financial infrastructure barrier operating well below the venture capital layer. Before femtech companies pitch investors, many can’t open a bank account, take card payments, or secure business insurance.
The global women’s health sector is valued at over $60 billion and is growing at more than 16% annually. The barriers aren’t regulatory and they are solvable.
Before the VC Gap, There’s a Bigger Problem
“The Bias Burden: Why Women’s Health Businesses Struggle to Access Financial Services” draws on 14 months of research—surveys of more than 35 companies and interviews with founders, underwriters, risk experts, and compliance professionals across the UK and Europe. It found that 100% of the 28 companies surveyed had faced barriers accessing banking, payments, insurance, or e-commerce services.
The damage is measurable:
- 82% of founders lost time resolving financial services barriers
- 64% lost revenue
- 43% delayed their product launch
Those numbers understate what’s actually happening. The real cost is the cascade. “Female founders are generally awarded less money than male founders, so they have a smaller pot to play with in the first place,” explains Clio Wood, co-founder of CensHERship. “And then there are these fundamental barriers and hurdles that they are facing, so they can’t even be efficient with that smaller pot that they have.”
A founder pulled from a payment provider with six days’ notice doesn’t just lose a week. She loses a week she might have spent on a funding pitch. With a smaller cash runway than a comparable male-led company, she has fewer weeks to spare.
The macroeconomic stakes are not small. McKinsey estimated in 2024 that closing the women’s health gap could boost the global economy by at least $1 trillion annually by 2040, with every $1 invested generating $3 in economic growth. The World Economic Forum and Boston Consulting Group found in January 2026 that women’s health captures just 6% of private healthcare investment globally, despite women representing nearly half the world’s population. Financial infrastructure barriers are a multiplier on that gap, not a separate problem.
When “Menstrual” Lands on the Same Block List as Pornography
The mechanism behind the barriers is straightforward enough to be absurd. Women’s health companies are misclassified—either by algorithm or by human judgment operating on incomplete information. At company registration, businesses choose NAICS and SIC industry codes in North America, and ISIC and ICB elsewhere. These haven’t been updated to reflect the femtech sector. Those codes flow directly into bank, insurer, and payment processor onboarding systems. By the time a human reviews an application, the system has already flagged the company as high-risk.
Once flagged, keyword-matching takes over. Classification systems treat anatomical and medical terms—menstrual, vagina, sexual health—the same way they treat adult entertainment. The problem isn’t regulation; it’s systems that default to caution when they don’t understand women’s health.
When institutions do file suspicious activity reports, anti-money-laundering rules prohibit them from disclosing that fact to the customer. But even when no formal investigation is involved, compliance culture produces the same result: silence. Founders are denied without explanation. They are left to guess the rules, reapply to a different branch, or start over with another institution entirely.
“If you are miscategorized into this higher risk segment—where we’ve had founders say, because they’ve mentioned the words sexual health, sexual wellbeing as part of their business application, they’re getting in the same category as firearms or tobacco risk—that will follow you around for other applications as well,” describes Anna O’Sullivan, co-founder of CensHERship.
The financial services barriers documented in the report mirror a broader pattern of algorithmic suppression of women’s health content across digital platforms—one this contributor has covered previously.
The industry is beginning to push back. On March 9, 2026, CensHERship launched the Women’s Health Visibility Alliance, backed by more than 600 founders, clinicians, charities, and investors, who signed an open letter calling on social media platforms to stop treating medically accurate women’s health content as adult material. According to CensHERship’s survey data, 95% of women’s health organizations reported experiencing censorship—and four in ten said it had happened more than ten times in a single year.
The UK Parliament’s Women and Equalities Committee published a report on March 4, 2026, finding that menstrual and gynecological health is not being sufficiently prioritized in the NHS, the UK’s national public health system. The timing is telling: The same week Parliament criticized institutional failure to take menstrual conditions seriously, bank algorithms were freezing accounts of companies that used the word “menstrual” in their business descriptions. The bias operates at every level of the system simultaneously.
Bias Baked In—And Getting Worse
Underlying all of these issues is a data problem that predates the platforms and the algorithms. “What it looks like in financial services is that the information is incorrect at the beginning,” emphasizes Wood. “So it leads to a misclassification of whether you are high risk or not. Ultimately, it’s about misunderstanding and misinformation.”
Wood is direct about where it goes from here. “AI is built on bias,” she says. “Historical data is largely male. And it’s going to learn from itself, and it’s just going to increase the problem.”
The United States mandated inclusion of women in medical research in 1993. The United Kingdom didn’t follow until 2025. The risk models, underwriting frameworks, and algorithmic filters built since then reflect the knowledge base on which they were trained.
The Institutions That Move First Win the Market
Not every institution is standing still. Global insurance underwriter Tokio Marine Kiln surveyed the femtech market, found that 76% of femhealth founders struggled to obtain insurance, and built a dedicated product—IntelliMed Life Sciences—to serve them. That’s a clean example of reading the data correctly: The barriers aren’t evidence that the sector is risky. There’s evidence that it’s underserved.
CensHERship is launching FemTick in 2026, an accreditation framework loosely modeled on B Corp status, certifying banks, insurers, and payment providers that demonstrate fair, transparent access to femtech businesses. Its founding partner cohort already includes a bank, an insurer, a payment provider, a law firm, and an accountancy firm—the full service stack a femtech company needs to operate.
“It shouldn’t take that leadership being a female leader for that to happen,” points out O’Sullivan. “It can absolutely be an ally to lead that charge, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because commercially it makes sense to take the opportunity of this growing femtech and women’s health innovation market and be that first mover into the space.”
The Question American Banks Haven’t Answered
“The Bias Burden” focused on the UK and Europe. The financial infrastructure barriers it documents are not limited to those countries. The Center for Intimacy Justice has documented the same suppression patterns across U.S. platforms. The investment data is global. American banks, insurers, and payment processors face the same question their European counterparts are now being asked: Does your onboarding system flag “menstrual” as a risk word? Do your underwriting policies explicitly exclude female hormones while covering male ones?
The first institutions to change their answers will capture a market worth $60 billion and growing. “These problems have very long tentacles into the rest of your business,” notes Wood. “It impacts the whole life cycle of women’s health and femtech.”
