Commercial co-opting of feminist health narratives

In her 2021 book Unwell Women,1 the feminist historian Elinor Cleghorn charts the long and troubling story of medicine’s approach to women, their bodies, and their illnesses. From Plato’s description of “vexed and aggrieved” wombs that wandered throughout the body wreaking physical and mental havoc, to the exclusion of women from clinical trials until the late 1980s,2 women, Cleghorn notes, have been subjected to a gender bias “ingrained in medical culture and practice for centuries.” Policies and practice in public health do not escape charges of misogyny and bias either—often viewing women’s health needs as synonymous with their reproductive systems and reproductive capacity.3 In the past few years, however, a different perspective on women’s health has taken hold across large parts of medicine and medical practice: women’s health as a source of profit. And in an added twist, companies involved in the commercialisation of women’s health are using the language of feminism to promote their products.

In their analysis of commercial companies marketing under-tested interventions to women, Copp and colleagues describe how the …