Women's health businesses face hidden barriers in banking, payments and business insurance - new report
New research from CensHERship and The Case for Her explores barriers for legitimate companies
Women’s health and Femtech businesses across the UK and Europe are being locked out of essential financial infrastructure — including banking, payment processing, business insurance, ecommerce and app-store access — due to misclassification and risk-averse systems that wrongly treat them as “adult” or high-risk, according to a new report released today.
The Bias Burden: why women’s health businesses struggle to access financial services, produced by advocacy initiative CensHERship in partnership with blended investment platform The Case For Her, draws on 14 months of research across Europe and the UK. It reveals how outdated classification systems, over-compliance and cultural discomfort combine to create structural barriers for legitimate women’s health companies.
The report documents how founders attempting to open bank accounts, take card payments, secure business insurance, sell products online or promote apps are routinely flagged, delayed, rejected or de-platformed — not because regulation prohibits them, but because systems do not understand women’s health and default to caution.
Startups featured include HANX, SheSpot, Perifit and Ove Care.
Examples in the report include:
A UK founder who was told her business was categorised alongside firearms and tobacco because it referenced sexual health.
A European medical pelvic floor device repeatedly mislabelled as “sexual entertainment,” affecting both fees and platform access.
A UK startup selling vaginal microbiome-friendly condoms refused service by a payment provider and deemed to be adult services.
“Legitimate women’s health companies are being blocked from banking, payments and business insurance simply because systems misunderstand what they do,” said Anna O’Sullivan, co-founder of CensHERship and founder and editor of FutureFemHealth.
“In most cases, this isn’t malicious or intentional — it’s what happens when people and systems meet something unfamiliar. But this unconscious bias can materially affect a founder’s ability to start, grow and scale a business.”
Barriers extend beyond financial services into major ecommerce platforms and app stores, where anatomical language, period education or fertility content is routinely flagged as inappropriate — limiting reach, slowing growth and creating unfair competitive disadvantage.
Systemic barriers in women’s health
The report builds on earlier findings from Censorship Revealed (2025), which showed widespread digital suppression of women’s health content on social and advertising platforms — revealing a consistent pattern that now extends into financial and commercial systems.
When combined with the already-documented venture-funding gap (in 2024 an estimated 8.5% of digital health investment goes to FemTech and just 2 percent of VC capital goes to female founders) and the persistent gender data gap (the historic under-representation of women in medical research) the result is a compounding disadvantage: barriers at every stage of innovation, from R&D to commercial establishment to revenue.
“Improving access to financial services is one of the most practical and impactful ways to support the women’s health ecosystem,” said Clio Wood, co-founder of CensHERship. “If companies can’t open accounts, take payments or insure their products, then innovation stalls before it begins. Removing this friction will unlock growth.”
With the global women’s health and Femtech sector growing at an estimated 16% annually and already worth an estimated $60 billion globally, these barriers are now a material economic risk.
Wendy Anderson and Cristina Ljungberg from The Case for Her said:
“As investors, we know that access to banking, payments and insurance is just as fundamental as access to capital. We’ve seen founders struggle simply to open a bank account - and that is a clear market failure. Fixing this issue is essential if we want to unlock one of the most promising growth markets in global health.”
A solvable problem
Crucially, the report concludes that these challenges are not primarily regulatory. They stem from interpretation, culture and leadership gaps - meaning they can be addressed.
“Our research with founders, operators as well as experts within the financial services space has identified that this is a solvable problem and a major opportunity for early movers,” said Anna O’Sullivan.
“If financial service providers update their internal frameworks, revisit financial risk appetite definitions and explicitly include women’s health within their accepted customer base, they could remove this friction almost overnight.”
The Bias Burden report outlines practical pathways for financial service providers to modernise risk frameworks and improve access for women’s health businesses.
“Banks, insurers, payment providers and platforms have a real opportunity to lead - and to be seen to lead - in one of the most dynamic growth markets in global health,” added Clio Wood.
“The opportunity and the responsibility could not be clearer.”
The full report ‘The Bias Burden’ is available at www.censhership.co.uk/research