After decades of being put on the back burner, women across the U.S. are “still waiting” to trust healthcare systems, a new report finds.
Langrand, a woman-led healthcare strategy firm, sought to find out what women’s trust in healthcare looks like today through its 2026 Women’s Health Report, “Still Waiting.” Through survey responses from 1,000 women between the ages of 18 and 44, the Oct. 28 report details “what it will take to earn that trust, and what it costs to keep women waiting."
“I expected frustration for sure,” Langrand’s CEO and founder, Shannon Langrand, said in an interview. “I didn't quite expect how behavioral it had become.”
According to the research, 73% of women surveyed have felt dismissed or not taken seriously by providers due to their gender, with 34% of that group remarking that this occurs “frequently.”
As the report points out, U.S. healthcare systems have a long, dark history of actively dismissing women, from the broad diagnosis of “hysteria” that was applied to women in the 1800s to the 1977 FDA guidance that kept women “of childbearing potential” out of early-stage drug trials until 1993. Even in 2024, women who report the same pain levels as men in an emergency treatment setting are less likely to be prescribed pain meds, the report points out.
Although “hysteria” as a blanket term for women’s symptoms isn’t something likely to be heard in a doctor’s office today, it isn’t uncommon for women’s concerns to be brushed off as hormonal or anxiety related. In fact, eight in 10 women surveyed reported having had their symptoms labeled as “stress, anxiety or hormonal,” while four in 10 (42%) heard that reaction “often,” the report found.
This can lead to misdiagnoses or delayed diagnoses. 33% of women surveyed have experienced a misdiagnosis or delayed diagnosis, a problem especially pronounced in the mental health, chronic pain, reproductive, autoimmune and cardiovascular realms. For serious health issues such as these, misdiagnoses can lead to dangerous consequences. For example, women are 50% more likely than men to receive the wrong diagnosis after a heart attack, the report notes, citing data from a study funded in part by the British Heart Foundation.
The history and continued reality of this dismissiveness hampers trust for women, with only 140 of the 1,000 (14%) women surveyed reporting that they “fully trust” traditional healthcare insitiutions to understand their needs.
As the research shows, those who are skeptical have nowhere else to go; 38% noted that they “trust no alternative” to traditional healthcare. This plays into real-world behavior, as 44% of women note that they “occasionally” skip or delay care due to cost, inconvenience or distrust, while 33% do the same “frequently.”
While cost is the top reasoning for this choice, one in three women attributed delaying care to prior negative experiences that make them hesitate to seek care again.
The findings also suggest that barriers like cost are not a “fixed” ceiling, as 52% of women surveyed said that they would “maybe” pay out of pocket for women-focused services and 28% replied that “yes,” they would. This speaks to part of the reason Langrand dug into this research.
“There’s a lot of attention on women,” right now, the CEO observed, pointing to, in part, a rising popularity in women’s sports. At the same time, she noticed women being even “less willing than they once were to keep adapting themselves to systems that weren’t really designed around them."
“Healthcare keeps asking patients to navigate complexity that healthcare created,” Langrand said in an interview. “What we're seeing is that women are beginning to route themselves and their families around that.”
“Embarrassingly basic” solutions
Beyond brick-and-mortar institutions and in-person HCP visits, health information on social media is trusted by some, although 47% of women surveyed report that they still trust doctors more than information distributed on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Eighteen percent, however, hold an “equal trust” for both doctors and social media.
For the most part (40%), women turn to social media for validation, not information, suggesting that feeling heard and seen is something they may be lacking from their providers, Langrand's research suggests.
To bring women back to traditional healthcare, providers may need to adapt their messaging and communication to women’s needs. The report offers tips such as leading with listening, acknowledging the history of barriers to women in healthcare and removing stigma by treating “asking for help as ordinary.”
To that point, “being listened to by clinicians” was the top answer (20%) when women were asked what would rebuild their trust the fastest, while “care that remembers me as a person” came in next with 17% of responses.
“The challenges outlined in this report are big ones," the report emphasized. "The fixes women ask for are not."
The solutions to rebuilding trust, Langrand said, are “almost embarrassingly basic” and could get even simpler when factoring in new technological advances such as artificial intelligence. As it stands, AI is largely used to help bolster operational efficiency in healthcare, but there’s still room for AI innovation to instead be used to help “meet that woman where she is” and create a more “human experience,” she suggested.
Importantly, women’s frustrations with the healthcare system hold weight beyond the individual. Seventy-seven percent of the women surveyed in the report make the healthcare decisions for their household, a key consideration when coupled with the research’s findings on behavioral changes such as delaying care or switching providers.
“I believe the industry should pay attention to that,” Langrand said. “When women walk, they are taking their influence over healthcare and the dollars that represents with them, and I think that’s something that the industry has not paid attention to very much.”