Same spend, different label - why women call health an indulgence, not an investment.
Women do not lack the will to prioritise their health. They lack the proof it pays off. At the heart of this issue sits research into women’s health and the gender bias that surfaces when women raise their health concerns.
It’s the same spend – but the label changes depending on who is paying.
Women are nearly twice as likely as men to describe an identical outlay on health and wellness as an “indulgence” rather than an “investment.” Only a third will use the word “investment” at all. Asked to name the highest-value use of their money – where their pound works hardest – just 18% point to their health.
Yet health has stopped behaving like a lifestyle expense and started behaving like an investment: an asset class, and one of the fastest-growing on earth.
The Global Wellness Institute reports that the industry is on track to approach $10 trillion by 2029. The investment case is already made and the science is catching up. Consumers are already there. Language and attitude are the last things to move.
Nowhere is that lag more visible than among the women actually doing the spending. LYMA’s own research shows why: nearly three-quarters of women aged 35–54 rank health as their top priority – then treat it as the first thing to cut, the priority that vanishes the moment life gets full.
The health gender divide when it comes to spending is real. A woman can rank her health above her career, her home, her holidays, and still not believe it’s where her money is best invested – not because she’s wrong about its value, but because no one has ever shown her the return. She’s been asked to prioritise health while the infrastructure to support that hasn’t caught up.
The gender bias behind the divide
For centuries, medical research has focused on men, and women are not treated as thoroughly or as promptly as men within the healthcare system.
That gap is evident not just historically, but in how women experience healthcare in the twenty-first century. In the 2022 KFF Women’s Health Survey of over 5,000 women, 29% who had seen a health provider in the last two years said their doctor had dismissed their concerns. A separate industry study has similarly found significant gaps in women’s health knowledge and healthcare experiences. Separately again, women are also more likely than men to say they’ve had to prove their symptoms before being taken seriously, especially with chronic conditions.
The mindset created by a healthcare system that has failed to prioritise women is reflected in data from LYMA’s own research: almost two-thirds (61%) of women aged 18–45 say they’re expected to age well without being given the tools to do so, and almost three-quarters say they know more about their health than they put into practise.
She doesn’t lack the will to prioritise her health. She lacks proof that it pays off – and no rebrand fixes that. Only evidence does.
“The women’s health conversation has expanded, but people recognise they don’t know what they don’t know. They want answers, yes, but increasingly they don’t know who to trust.”
Dr Florence Comite, endocrinologist and clinician-scientist
The LYMA POWER Index plugs the gap
The more health information becomes available, the more women demand evidence: clinical proof matters more than brand cachet across every age group, rising to 86% among women over 55, according to LYMA data. That diligence carries a measurable premium: consumers with a stronger preference for science-led beauty and wellness report an average maximum spend of $284 on a single product in the past 12 months, compared with $234 among more lifestyle-led consumers (source: Future:Poll™).
Yet diligence only pays off if the market is built to reward it – and closing that gap, backed by the science behind LYMA, is what the LYMA POWER Index exists to do.
Health spending has always been coded as guilt for women: a facial is a treat, a supplement stack is a splurge, a concierge physician is an extravagance – a vocabulary that subconsciously encourages women to ration or quietly cut back on prioritising their health.
It’s also why unprecedented innovation keeps stalling at the point of action. McKinsey finds 84% of consumers rank wellness as a top priority – yet only 13% say they’re actually hitting their health goals. The gap isn’t information, access, or even motivation. It’s the culture of what health gets spent on, not just thought about.
From indulgence to investment
This report by LYMA and The Future Laboratory argues for a fundamental revaluation: not treatment to prevention, not wellness to medicine, but indulgence to investment. Before women can claim the full return of longevity science, health itself has to be recognised as the most valuable investment they will ever make.
But language alone won’t close this gap. Rename a facial an “investment,” and nothing changes if the woman buying it still has no way to know whether it’s a good one.
That’s the deeper failure hiding inside the indulgence-to-investment story. Telling women to think differently about spending assumes the problem is vocabulary – if “wellness” sounded more like “wealth,” behaviour would follow. It won’t. Every real asset class comes with a way to judge value: a P/E ratio, a credit rating, a return on capital. This industry has none. A woman choosing between a $100 face cream, a $400 supplement stack, a $2,000 diagnostic panel, or a $10,000 longevity clinic has no equivalent measure – only vague science or marketing claims, each one asking to be taken on faith.
So the fix is not better language. It’s a better tool to judge value with. Consumers don’t need more language, or more products, assigned to their health; they need discernment: a way to tell a genuine return from an expensive story. Crowded with supplements, diagnostics, wearables, clinics, influencers and protocols, the market has matured faster than consumers’ ability to evaluate it.
This creates the need for something new: the LYMA POWER Index.
How the POWER Index works
The LYMA POWER Index is a framework for judging whether a specific health investment, action or behaviour change is actually worth it. It is akin to a credit rating: a credit rating doesn’t measure how healthy a company is, only whether one decision – lending it money – is sound.
The POWER Index asks the same of a health spend: not how healthy are you, but what does this investment change – does it give you more power over your long-term outcomes? Read the five letters behind the framework in LYMA POWER Index: The World’s First Health ROI Framework.
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