Women Have Changed Medicine. Has Healthcare Marketing Kept Up?

September 17 is National Women in Medicine Day, and next week we’ll be attending the Women in Medicine Summit. Both are good reasons to celebrate how women are changing healthcare, but as marketers, they also got me thinking about something else:

Has the way we market to and represent women in healthcare changed along with them?

Because representation is about a lot more than who we put in the picture.

Marketing to women isn’t a demographic strategy

Healthcare marketers know women are an important audience, but sometimes our attempts to reach them feel like they started with a demographic checkbox.

Women aren’t one patient persona.

A 32-year-old orthopedic patient training for her first marathon doesn’t have the same priorities as a 62-year-old researching a joint replacement. A physician choosing technology for her practice isn’t approaching that decision the same way a daughter researching senior care for her mom might.

Their needs are different. Their questions are different. Their lives are different.

Good marketing should understand that context rather than simply recognizing that the person on the other side of the screen is a woman.

That’s where research, conversations and actually listening to patients become a whole lot more useful than deciding it’s time to put more women in the stock photo library.

There’s another side of this conversation

We’re not only marketing healthcare to women. We’re marketing the women providing it.

And I think that’s where things get particularly interesting.

Spend some time looking at physician bios and you’ll start seeing a familiar collection of words. Compassionate. Dedicated. Caring. Passionate about helping patients.

There’s nothing wrong with any of those things. I’d certainly prefer my doctor to care about me.

But women in medicine are also researchers, surgeons, business owners, innovators, leaders and experts who have spent years developing very specific perspectives on their fields.

That’s a lot more interesting than “passionate about patient care.”

When we market a physician, we’re making choices about which parts of that person patients get to see. Credentials matter. Experience matters. But so do opinions, personality and perspective.

What does this physician believe about her specialty? What has treating thousands of patients taught her? What does she disagree with? What does she wish people understood before they ever walked into her office?

That’s where a provider starts becoming a brand rather than a bio.

Let women be the experts in their own stories

One of the things I keep coming back to in healthcare marketing is how much better the work gets when we stop trying to manufacture a personality and start paying attention to the person who’s already there.

Some physicians are warm and incredibly personable. Some are direct. Some are funny. Some completely nerd out about a tiny corner of their specialty and could happily talk about it for an hour.

Use that.

A female physician doesn’t need to fit a particular version of what a “relatable woman in healthcare” is supposed to look or sound like. She needs the opportunity to show patients how she thinks.

That might mean talking about a misconception she encounters constantly. It could mean explaining why she approaches a procedure differently than other providers. Maybe it’s discussing a problem in her specialty that she thinks the industry gets wrong.

Those perspectives do more than create interesting content. They give patients a better understanding of the person they’re considering trusting with their care.

Representation should have some depth to it

There is real value in seeing more women represented in healthcare advertising, on websites, in leadership content and across social media. But representation gets a lot more meaningful when women aren’t simply visible. They’re heard.

That’s the part marketers have some control over.

We can ask better questions during interviews. We can look beyond credentials when we’re building provider brands. We can stop assuming professional means personality-free. And we can create space for physicians to talk about the things they really care about instead of handing them another script for a 30-second treatment explainer.

None of this requires reinventing healthcare marketing.

It might just require getting a little more curious about the people we’re marketing.

So, has healthcare marketing kept up?

In some ways, absolutely. In others, I think we still have some work to do.

National Women in Medicine Day is a good reason to celebrate how much has changed. Heading into the Women in Medicine Summit next week, I’m a little more interested in what still needs to.

From a marketer’s perspective, that isn’t just about who we put in the picture. It’s about whose perspective we’re willing to put at the center of the story.