Women Deserve More Than Average. It’s Time Science Delivered.

Women’s health is having a long-overdue moment. But consumer demand and product innovation are moving faster than the clinical evidence needed to support them.

The opportunity now is not simply to create more products for women, but to create truly effective products supported by rigorous evidence that they work for women across different stages of life.

There’s just one problem: the “average woman” doesn’t exist.

Of course, no individual is truly average. But women’s hormonal fluctuations and physiological transitions across life stages make one-size-fits-all assumptions particularly challenging.

Two women of the same age may differ substantially in hormonal status, metabolism, symptoms, and lifestyle — and respond very differently to the same intervention. Yet health research too often asks only whether an intervention works on average. Women deserve a more useful answer: What works, for whom, when, and at what dose?

Getting those answers requires fundamentally rethinking the relationship between product development and clinical research — not simply to validate products after they are developed, but to start by generating the human evidence that enables next-gen innovation.

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Beyond Inclusion to Precision

Correcting women’s historical underrepresentation in research is essential. But inclusion is a starting point, not the finish line. Women are not a single biological population, and age alone cannot capture reproductive or menopausal status.

From reproductive years through pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, and postmenopause, physiology and health needs evolve. Nor should today’s overdue attention to menopause narrow our ambitions. Sleep, mood, cognition, metabolism, hormonal health, and muscle and bone health are interconnected across the female life course.

Fortunately, technology is transforming not only how we study women, but who can participate.

Decentralized randomized controlled trials reduce traditional barriers to participation. With this clinical model, women can now participate from home rather than needing to live near a clinical site to be eligible and then, once enrolled, repeatedly travel to it. Women balancing careers, caregiving, family responsibilities, and other demands have greater opportunities to contribute.

This democratization of participation can also produce evidence that more accurately reflects the populations we aim to serve. Studying women in their everyday environments, rather than exclusively in specialized clinical settings, allows us to assess outcomes under conditions closer to how wellness products are actually used. Combined with larger, more diverse participation and rigorous study design, this can improve both the real-world relevance and the generalizability of findings.

But we can do even more. Greater inclusion and more representative evidence are only the beginning. The real opportunity is understanding meaningful differences within these diverse populations.

For example, in Radicle Science studies — where we’ve completed gold-standard, placebo-controlled trials on nearly 50,000 American women over the past 5 years — we’ve observed products that significantly outperformed placebo among women broadly, others only among women over 40, and still others only among postmenopausal women. Similarly, the most effective dose for one population may not be optimal for another. Such findings illustrate how averages can obscure insights critical to developing more targeted, effective interventions.

“Instead of finding out whether a finished product works, we can now harness rapid, large-scale experimentation to discover what should be taken to the market in the first place.”

Inverting Clinical Research: From Validation to Invention

Traditional wellness innovation often starts with a formulation, followed by commercialization and, sometimes, a rigorous clinical trial to validate it.

What if we inverted that sequence?

At the heart of scientific discovery is experimentation: forming hypotheses, rigorously testing them, learning from the results, and using those insights to guide the next generation of innovation.

Historically, the time, cost, and complexity of clinical trials have constrained how much experimentation was practical. But technology is fundamentally changing that equation.

Today, technology-enabled research platforms can support larger, rigorous, randomized, placebo-controlled trials that clinically test multiple candidate interventions in parallel. Instead of studying one formulation at a time, waiting for results, and then beginning again, researchers can investigate multiple possibilities within a common experimental framework.

This makes it possible to rapidly identify promising interventions, understand differences in response, and eliminate less effective approaches far more efficiently — without sacrificing scientific rigor.

More importantly, it changes the output of clinical research. Instead of finding out whether a finished product works, we can now harness rapid, large-scale experimentation to discover what should be taken to the market in the first place.

Clinical evidence becomes an iterative engine of discovery, formulation, and improvement, not simply a validation expense at the end of product development.

For women’s wellness, where physiology and needs vary so substantially, this evidence-first approach is especially critical. It has the potential to transform how we innovate and develop precision products tailored to women’s diverse needs.

Higher-Resolution Evidence, Smarter Innovation

Technology also allows us to combine validated health assessments with physical and digital biomarkers, wearables, and other emerging digital measures, which often collect data continuously. The resulting multidimensional evidence can reveal changes and relationships that traditional, narrowly focused assessments might miss.

AI and machine learning add another dimension, helping identify participant profiles that combine life stage, physiology, behaviors, symptoms, and other characteristics — and explore how treatment responses differ across those profiles.

Of course, AI must complement, not replace, rigorous experimentation, biostatistics, and appropriate validation. Precision without scientific rigor is simply another form of hype.

As I discussed in Nutraceuticals World’s editorial webinar “Advancing Women’s Health with Precision Nutrition” in September, the next breakthrough in women’s wellness may not be another ingredient; it may be our ability to discover, with unprecedented scale and resolution, which interventions work for which women, and use that knowledge to develop better products.

After all, women deserve more than products designed for an imaginary average. They deserve research that reflects their real lives, recognizes their differences, and fuels innovations with a far greater ambition: extending women’s healthspan.

The future of women’s wellness should be both proven and precise.

About the Author: Pelin Thorogood is Co-Founder and Executive Chair of Radicle Science, an AI-powered healthtech pioneer recognized by Fast Company as a World Changing Idea and by the Inc. 5000 as one of America’s fastest-growing companies. Pelin’s category-defining work earned her the Inc. 200 Female Founder award in 2023. Previously, she held pivotal C-level roles, including CEO, across public and private companies, establishing herself as a data and analytics trailblazer. For more information: https://www.radiclescience.com/