International Women’s Day 2021: Q&A with Kate Bache, co-founder & managing director of Health and Her

This year, the International Women’s Day theme is ‘choose to challenge’ with a focus on challenging change to create a gender equal world.

The day marks a call to action for accelerating women’s equality, celebrating women’s achievements and raising awareness against bias. Throughout the year, we have observed EIP clients who are committed to improving gender equality and today we are celebrating them.

About Health & Her®

Health & Her® is an award-winning health hub that aims to cut through the confusion when it comes to female health. Health & Her provides advice and support from the UK’s leading menopause experts via their expert articles and Menopause Clinic. They offer a range of the best products from around the world to support perimenopause and menopause symptoms and a free ‘personal trainer’ app designed to coach women through menopause.

Health & Her are on a mission to improve lives of millions of women around the world living with life-affecting symptoms of menopause.

Meet Kate Bache

Originally a qualified chemist (MChem), Kate quickly moved into commercial roles and has more than 13 years’ experience in blue chip pharmaceutical and FMCG companies.

Kate has held senior marketing and innovation positions in international functions across Europe and Australasia for Reckitt Benckiser, Kellogg’s and PepsiCo. A specialist in international innovation, commercialisation and marketing leadership, Kate initially started her entrepreneurial endeavours by founding and successfully exiting successful femcare brand, KIND Organic.

It was during this time, Kate discovered the complete lack of support for women experiencing severe symptoms of female health and in particular the poor availability of products and solutions for women experiencing menopause.

Hi Kate. Could you tell us more about what made you want to start Health and Her?

My initial research unearthed some shocking statistics related to this stage of women’s lives with the highest rates of divorce, suicide and job leavers associated with women aged 45-55. Further studies conducted by Health & Her showed the far-reaching impact of these issues with the UK economy losing 14 million days a year[1] to women managing symptoms associated with menopause. This equates to £1.8bn GDP lost annually.

There was a clear gap in the market for a resource where women could understand their choices, discover information and find solutions and so Health & Her was born.

Where do you see the femtech industry being in five years’ time?

Femtech is an incredibly exciting industry at the moment with very high levels of innovation that are directly impacting on women’s lives. For me, the most exciting direction of travel is towards highly personalised solutions based on an individual’s hormones. I believe that in 5 years’ time, we could see ideas which would significantly improve women’s female health symptoms through passive diagnostic and delivery technology.

How has the growing discussion about women's health affected your business?

Menopause in particular has become a hot topic in recent years and this has certainly allowed us to talk more directly to women about their options. There’s still a long way to go vs. other women’s health issues such as periods and fertility but as these younger generations start to move toward perimenopause, we hope that their openness to these subjects will translate into menopause and the topic gets the airtime it needs to improve the lives of millions of women.

How can everyone get involved in supporting smarter women’s health?

This International Women's day we want to #ChooseToChallenge the taboos around Menopause and open the conversation for us all to talk about the symptoms of perimenopause and menopause and how they impact the millions of women in the UK.

Women’s health doesn’t just affect women. Fathers, brothers, husbands, sons and society as a whole are affected by the challenges of female health. We have an incredibly long way to go to solve the issues that millions of women face every day and I believe that we need everyone to realise this to make significant and lasting change for the better.

[1] Censuswide survey, 1003 menopausal women, UK, 2019

At EIP, we are committed to diversity and inclusion. We believe in equal opportunity in all areas and we are proud that diversity is a core part of our culture.