With the help of emerging internet communities on social media spaces such as Reddit, women are discovering new ways to navigate a historical gap in women’s health research, a new report finds.
Weber Shandwick and Reddit partnered up in a July report (PDF) that aims to decode the “new health ecosystem” and the modern women’s health content discovery journey, which, as it turns out, takes place on Reddit. The partners surveyed 886 adult women and their partners in the U.S., analyzing their information-seeking behaviors across Reddit and the broader social media landscape.
The survey findings suggest a growing preference for Reddit as a place to partake in unfiltered, anonymous discussion about health topics, with 81% of women reporting that they’re more comfortable discussing their bodies on Reddit than with their own family and friends when it comes to sensitive health topics.
Additionally, people are turning to Reddit more and more to understand their partners’ symptoms and challenges, with 57% seeking how to offer the most helpful support to their partner during a health issue.
The report attributes these proactive information-seeking patterns to a “profound experimental gap” between clinical guidance and lived experience, pointing to a review of National Institutes of Health (NIH) priority projects that found only 11% of priority projects from 2018 to 2020 focused on female-specific conditions. Polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS, previously known as PCOS), a common condition with hundreds of thousands of followers on a community page on Reddit, was left off of the NIH’s tracking system until 2022, the report notes.
This lack of investment and focus on women’s health needs lead women to create their own communities and support systems on platforms such as Reddit, which itself is experiencing high growth across Google searches and within AI-driven searches.
“There’s a sense of community that exists from people trying to help each other,” Weber Shandwick’s EVP of client experience, Kathleen Hunter, explained in a recent interview.
The report marks Weber Shandwick’s second year partnering with Reddit to research women’s health topics, which has been something of a “joint passion project,” Hunter said. This year, the duo looked specifically to explore the “fragmented content discovery space” women are navigating, as the “discovery journey” evolves and grows to involve large language models and other platforms.
The findings show that these information-seeking trends also manifest in growth across women-specific subreddits, such as r/askwomenover60 with 1924% year-on-year growth, r/osteoporosis with 256% growth and r/menopause with 53% growth compared to last year, according to the report, with female Reddit users engaging with the platform across age groups and life stages, such as menopause, postpartum and more.
“Reddit is a place that does transcend,” Hunter said, citing the “intergenerational knowledge sharing” that hallmarks the platform.
The knowledge-sharing and community-forming nature of Reddit may also be shaped by the anonymized structure of the platform, which could foster “open, transparent conversation” in a safe environment, Fahti Khosrowshahi, founder and CEO of Ceek Women’s Health added in the interview. Ceek focuses on redesigning gynecological care and markets Nella, a modern vaginal speculum.
“Hearing that unfiltered dialog has been really valuable,” Khosrowshahi pointed out, referring to Reddit conversations surrounding unmet needs for pelvic exams. “This is a venue where women feel safe to share their experiences, and I think specifically on sensitive topics like pelvic health and sexual trauma.”
Although Reddit’s users are anonymous, the unbiased validation and advice from other women create a “very credible online community,” Khosrowshahi explained, noting that women will often turn to online channels to share their anxieties or concerns before bringing it up with a clinician.
After using Reddit, 7 in 10 women reported feeling more prepared for healthcare conversations, the report found, with 47% achieving a better understanding of what is “normal versus concerning” in terms of their health, compared to 20% of non-Redditors. About 39% of those surveyed reported feeling more confident going into a doctor’s appointment over the 16% of non-Redditors who said the same.
While Reddit can't serve as a replacement for a doctor, it can help with “bridging the gap throughout the journey,” Hunter added.
“It’s like peeling the layers of an onion,” Khosrowshahi said. For example, in the case of understanding younger women’s anxieties over an initial pelvic exam, Reddit “allows us to slowly peel the layers of the onion to understand what is the source of the anxiety,” she explained.