From Jodi Business of Women's Health |
Menopause Gets 90 Minutes in Medical School. It's One of the Biggest Categories in Women's Health.How an entire specialty gets built from scratch, and how to read the signs before everyone else does. I built my first two companies in fertility. When I first started, I was surprised to find out just how little is taught about fertility in medical school. Less than half of medical students get any formal education on infertility, and most say their own risk of age-related fertility decline was never discussed in school. It's the same for menopause. Most medical students get about an hour of menopause education across their entire time in medical school, and a national survey of residents found 20% had never received a single lecture on it, with only 6.8% feeling prepared to treat a menopausal patient. And yet menopause is now one of the fastest-growing parts of women's health, and by a lot of measures, the single biggest economic opportunity in the space. More than a billion women worldwide are in menopause right now. I've been fortunate to watch the rise of investment in fertility, and now in menopause. What an honor to watch two categories be born in women's health. And if you're building a career in this industry, watching how they're born isn't just interesting, it tells you where the jobs are about to be. The systems thinker in me started to wonder this weekend: how is a category actually created, and how can you, as readers who want to work in women's health, spot the next one? So I started to dig into the research. Here's what I found. Step one: name the category nobody was namingThe first step to creating a category isn't a product. It's a name. For decades, fertility wasn't talked about outside of the four walls of a house. Menopause symptoms got folded into other diagnoses, dismissed as aging, or just not discussed at all. There was no shared language for it. No similar language between patients and doctors, not between founders and investors. You can't build a market for something nobody has agreed is a distinct, treatable problem. Sociologist Mark Kennedy's 2008 study in the American Sociological Review traced this mechanism precisely: a market does not become real to outside observers until it is counted and named as a group, and the firms that get counted early are the ones that end up defining what the category means. Naming is not marketing. It is the act that makes a market exist in the first place. (There's another whole article to be written about this in women's health.) The first move, every time, is naming the problem medicine ignored. Not solving it yet. Just saying, clearly and repeatedly, this is real, and here's what it costs. What's next for us to name? Step two: build the language, even if it's not clinically cleanClinically, perimenopause, menopause, and post-menopause are three different hormonal states. But if you ask most investors and everyday women, they don't separate them. They put all of it in one box: the menopause phase of life. That's not sloppy thinking, it's category building. Businesses don't get funded around clinical nuance. They get funded around a market big enough to matter. Collapsing three hormonal states into one commercial category was a choice, and it's the choice that made the market legible to people writing checks and women talking about this around brunch tables. This is not unique to menopause. A landmark Journal of Marketing study by Rosa, Porac, Runser-Spanjol, and Saxon traced how the minivan itself became a category, not through engineers settling on a clean technical definition, but through years of producers and buyers negotiating a shared, imprecise concept until it hardened into common use. Every category on the market today, minivans and menopause alike, was agreed into existence. What are we circling around next? Step three: build the buyer before you perfect the delivery modelOnce you have a name and a language, you need a buyer: patient, employer, and health plan, usually in that order. This is the part people underestimate. It's a much harder sell than "we built a better app." It's "we built a case for why this should be in your budget at all." I've experienced this firsthand as a patient with one of the newer menopause platforms, strong on the business side, still finding its footing on the actual care. The visits felt more like a check-the-box exercise than a real conversation, and despite being told I was in-network, I still ended up with a bill I wasn't expecting. Building the buyer and building the delivery model are two different jobs, and right now, this category is further along on the first one than the second. The sequencing itself has been documented. Chad Navis and Mary Ann Glynn's 2010 study in Administrative Science Quarterly, tracking the rise of satellite radio, found that market attention only shifts from questioning whether a category is legitimate to comparing which company inside it is best once legitimacy has already been won. Menopause has cleared that bar. The argument over who delivers the care well is the one just now beginning. If you're looking for where to work in this category, that gap is your answer. Companies that have already won their buyer and are now scrambling to fix and optimize delivery need exactly what was missing from my visit: people who can build real patient experience, real care navigation, real communication, inside a business model that was built to sell first and deliver second. That's not a knock on the category. It's a hiring wave, and it's happening right now while most people are still arguing about whether menopause care is "real." Learning to spot that gap, and to talk about it credibly in an interview, is a big part of what we teach in our Marketing in Women's Health 101 webinar on the nuances and systemic challenges of marketing something like menopause. It's a hiring wave, and it's happening right now while most people are still arguing about whether menopause care is "real." |
Why watching a category get born is a career skill, not just a founder oneYou don't have to build the next category to benefit from knowing how one forms. You just have to be able to read it. Every company in women's health right now is somewhere in this same four-step arc: naming, language, buyer, delivery. A company still fighting to be taken seriously needs believers and generalists who can wear a lot of hats. A company that's landed its first big employer or health plan contract needs people who can execute against that promise. Knowing which stage a company is in tells you what they're actually hiring for, and how much competition you'll have getting in the door. Menopause isn't a trend you're catching late. It's a live example, happening right now, of exactly how these things get built: name, language, buyer, delivery, in that order. Even One Medical just moved into menopause care through employer channels. The people who learn to see this pattern will spot the next category before it's obvious to everyone else, and get there before the job listings say so. So what: the next time you see a "gap" in women's health, don't just ask whether someone will eventually solve it. Ask what stage it's in, because that tells you exactly what kind of roles are about to open up. That's the whole premise behind our Business of Women's Health 101 webinar: how these categories actually get built, and what's likely coming next. Hope to see you this week or next in our IWH classrooms. Onward,  |
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