A wealth management and private banking figure uses her understanding of structural mispricing in capital markets to identify a systemic problem. Women's health is an example, she says – and that creates opportunities for investors and women alike.

Maryann Umoren Selfe, who is president, FemmeHealth Alliance, and a global wealth and investment strategist – with a career spanning firms including Credit Suisse (later UBS) and Banque International Ă  Luxembourg Suisse – is the author of a new book. Entitled The Billion Dollar Blindspot, her work concerns what she argues is a problem – women’s health has been overlooked and is a major case of mispricing in the capital market. This news service recently interviewed Selfe about the book and what led her to write it. Selfe is also a member of WealthBriefing’s editorial board. (More details on the book, which will be published in late May, below.)

What has led you to write The Billion Dollar Blindspot?
Twenty-five years advising ultra-high net worth families and institutional investors on capital allocation trains you to look for structural mispricings, market conditions where price and value have diverged in ways that are systematic rather than random. Women's health is one of the clearest examples of structural mispricing I have encountered in my career.

Less than 2 per cent of private healthcare funding is directed at conditions affecting women exclusively. Yet women make over 80 per cent of household healthcare decisions and are the fastest-growing cohort of wealth holders globally. The gap between their economic weight and the capital allocated to their health needs is a market signal and an investment opportunity. The book is my attempt to make that case at the level of rigour it deserves.

Let's talk about the idea that women's health is a structurally mispriced segment of healthcare – what does that mean and what is causing this mispricing?
Structural mispricing arises when an asset or a category is persistently undervalued due to information gaps, biases embedded in capital allocation frameworks, or misaligned incentives rather than a deterioration in underlying fundamentals.

Women’s health fits this pattern.

For decades, large parts of medical research were built on male-centric data, leaving critical gaps in how conditions affecting women are understood, diagnosed, and treated. Clinical trial participation has historically underrepresented women in certain areas, particularly where hormonal or reproductive variables were seen as complicating factors.

These gaps feed directly into how markets function. Investment decisions are all shaped by available evidence. When that evidence is incomplete, risk is perceived to be higher and outcomes less predictable. The result is a category where underlying demand is clear and growing, but capital formation lags, not because the opportunity is weak, but because the systems used to evaluate it were not designed to fully capture it.

What does your book say in terms of how this mispricing can be resolved?
The book argues that this mispricing is beginning to correct through three converging forces.

First, sex-specific medicine is producing the level of clinical evidence needed to change system behaviour. It is now clear that biological differences between men and women can lead to materially different outcomes, and that evidence is increasingly shaping regulatory, reimbursement, and investment decisions.

Second, digital health infrastructure has reached deployment scale. AI-enabled diagnostics and care platforms are delivering real clinical and commercial outcomes, while the cost of building and scaling health technology has compressed, accelerated by the Covid pandemic.

Third, the Great Wealth Transfer is aligning capital with lived experience. As more capital moves into the hands of women, the willingness and ability to allocate into these areas is increasing. Together, these forces are shifting how evidence is generated, how care is delivered, and how capital is allocated, creating the conditions for structural repricing.

Who is this book aimed at? 
The book is written primarily for investment professionals; private banks, family offices, asset allocators, and the advisors who support them. Many of us sit in the position of stewarding capital on behalf of clients, and that role is beginning to shift in ways that are hard to ignore.

As the Great Wealth Transfer reshapes the client base, the change is already visible in how decisions are being made. Clients are no longer delegating in the same way. They are more present in the process, asking different questions, pushing beyond standard portfolio construction, and bringing their own experiences into how they think about risk and opportunity.

You see it in where capital is going. Allocations that once would have sat comfortably within a private bank mandate are now being made more directly –through family offices, co-investments, and trusted networks. There is a growing willingness to back areas that feel both economically compelling and personally relevant, including healthcare and, increasingly, women’s health. The centre of gravity is moving from outsourced, model-driven allocation to more engaged, conviction-led capital.

The book provides a rigorous, independent framework for evaluating women’s health as an investable category, grounded in capital markets.

It is also written for HNW and UHNW individuals who are inheriting or building significant wealth and are increasingly stepping into investment decision-making themselves. This group is actively looking for a more intentional approach to deploying capital, and the book offers a structured way to assess and allocate into women’s health with both discipline and conviction.

Can you talk about what the opportunities are for investing in women's healthcare? In what ways might they differ between countries – such as government involvement in healthcare?
The opportunity in women’s health is not a single segment. It sits across the healthcare value chain, and where you invest depends on how evidence and infrastructure are evolving. Three areas stand out.

First, sex-specific diagnostics and care pathways. As clinical evidence improves, conditions affecting women can be identified and treated earlier, creating scalable opportunities across diagnostics, therapeutics, and care models.

Second, digital health infrastructure. AI-enabled diagnostics and care delivery platforms are now operating at scale, with materially improved economics, shifting the category from pilots to deployable businesses.

Third, data platforms. A significant part of the opportunity lies in building and structuring the evidence base itself, turning fragmented data into clinical and commercial insight.

Where this becomes more nuanced is across jurisdictions. In predominantly public healthcare systems, the constraint is not demand but reimbursement. Adoption is driven by clinical evidence and health economics, which can slow commercialisation but, once achieved, this creates more stable and defensible revenue streams.

In private or mixed systems, the pathway to revenue is faster, particularly for out-of-pocket or employer-funded solutions. But the trade off is fragmentation and a smaller immediately addressable market. For investors, this is not just a geographic question. It is also a portfolio construction question. Public systems reward longer-duration capital with a focus on evidence and reimbursement. Private systems favour speed, distribution, and consumer adoption. What is consistent across both is the underlying demand. Demographics, longevity, and the historical data gap are creating a structural tailwind. The difference is not whether the opportunity exists, but how, and how quickly, it is monetised.

What are the main drivers of women's healthcare from an investment point of view today, and how have they changed? How, for example, have longer lifespans and healthspan affected it, as well as changing rates of childbirth?
The drivers are the same ones reshaping healthcare more broadly, but they are converging in a way that is particularly acute in women’s health.

First, the data shift. Historically, women’s health suffered from a lack of sex-specific clinical data. That is now changing. As datasets improve and evidence becomes more robust, the category is moving from being perceived as complex and uncertain to one that can be underwritten with greater confidence.

Second, longevity. As women live longer, the number of years spent in post-reproductive health has expanded significantly. Conditions that were once under-researched because they were associated with later life; cardiovascular disease, bone health, cognitive decline, are now central to the economic lifespan. That has materially increased the addressable market.

Third, demographic and social change. Declining birth rates and later motherhood are shifting the centre of gravity away from a narrow focus on reproductive health toward the full arc of women’s health across the lifespan. That expands both the scope and the durability of the market.

What has changed is not just awareness, but the underlying economics. The combination of better data, longer lifespans, and shifting demographics is turning what was once a fragmented niche into a scalable, long-duration investment category.

Healthcare has been a heavily regulated area, and this can create challenges for investors. How do you address this topic?
Regulation in healthcare is not a constraint to work around. It is a core part of the investment case.

It creates barriers to entry that protect well-positioned capital, and it slows adoption in a way that rewards investors who can underwrite longer timelines. In that sense, it functions much like infrastructure: once an asset is embedded within clinical pathways and reimbursement systems, revenue becomes more durable and defensible.

Where women’s health is different is that the regulatory system has historically been built on incomplete clinical evidence. That is now changing. As sex-specific data improves, the science is moving faster than the policy frameworks that sit around it.

That creates a transition period. For short-duration capital, it can feel like friction. For long-duration investors, it is where value is created; identifying companies that are building evidence, navigating regulatory pathways, and positioning themselves for reimbursement before the category is fully recognised.

For institutional investors, regulation is not a reason to avoid the space. It is the mechanism through which returns are ultimately secured.

What misconceptions around healthcare investing do you come across?
There are a few patterns that come up consistently.

The first is that women’s health is treated as a niche category. In practice, that framing comes from how capital has historically been allocated, not from the underlying demand. Half the population is not a niche, the category has simply sat outside mainstream investment frameworks.

The second is that it is positioned as an impact or ESG allocation rather than a return-generating one. What we are seeing on the ground is different. The investment case is being driven by market inefficiency, improving unit economics, and a clear demand-supply gap. The social outcome is real, but it is not what underwrites the returns.

The third is that the opportunity is confined to early-stage venture. That may have been true a decade ago, but it is no longer the case. Today, you can access the theme across the capital stack; from growth equity to private credit to infrastructure-like assets, depending on your risk appetite and time horizon.

What is interesting is that the perception is lagging the reality. The market is already evolving, but many investors are still anchored to an earlier version of the category.

How did the Covid pandemic affect your thinking that led into writing the book? 
Covid mattered because it made something visible that had been easy to ignore.

Before the pandemic, differences in how men and women experienced disease were documented, but they sat in specialist literature. Covid brought that into the open. In real time, at global scale, we saw differences in symptom profiles, severity, and long-term outcomes by sex.

For me, that was a shift, from seeing this as a fragmented set of observations to recognising it as a systemic data gap with real clinical and economic consequences.

At the same time, Covid forced healthcare systems to adopt digital infrastructure at speed. Remote care, diagnostics, and data capture moved from optional to essential. That mattered for women’s health in particular, because access and delivery have historically been part of the constraint.

So the shift was not that the problem was new. It was that it became visible, measurable, and increasingly actionable. Covid didn’t create the thesis. It removed the ability to ignore it.

What in your view is the most appealing aspect of women's healthcare from an investor's point of view?
The most compelling aspect is the asymmetry.

You have a category where the fundamentals are strengthening; better evidence, clear demand, improving unit economics, but capital has not yet fully repriced it. That gap between what is and how it is valued is where returns are generated.

In most markets, by the time the data is clear, the opportunity is already priced. In women’s health, the data is improving, but the capital is still catching up. That creates a window where investors can build exposure ahead of consensus

In terms of your book – who is it going to be published by, how long is it, etc?
The Billion Dollar Blindspot is published by Blindspot Press and will be launched on 26 May 2026, with pre-orders open now. It is an investment thesis in book form; analytical, capital markets-driven and designed to help investors evaluate women’s health as an investable category.

Are there specific companies and sectors in healthcare you admire and mention in the book — can you give any named examples?
In the book, I reference companies as illustrations of specific dynamics, rather than as recommendations. The focus is on how value is being created across the category, not on individual names.That said, the patterns are becoming clear. The most interesting activity is in three areas: first, diagnostics and care pathways in conditions that have historically been under-researched, where improved evidence is beginning to translate into scalable models; second, longevity and preventive care platforms built around sex-specific medicine; and third, the data infrastructure layer. companies that are generating, structuring, and translating sex-disaggregated data into clinical and commercial decisions. What these have in common is that innovation is moving faster than capital, and where improving fundamentals are meeting persistent underallocation.

Are there other points you would like to make?
One point that is still underestimated in institutional conversations is the role of the Great Wealth Transfer. This is not background context. It is changing who controls capital and how it is allocated. As wealth moves into the hands of women, the distance between capital and lived experience is narrowing. That has direct implications for how investment priorities are set. You can already see the shift. 

Private banks and family offices are adjusting to a more engaged client base, and capital is beginning to move in ways that reflect that. The investment frameworks, however, are still catching up. That gap between how capital is evolving and how it is still being allocated is where the opportunity sits. That is the structural argument the book makes, and it is why the conversation is still at an early stage.

About the author
Maryann Selfe, FCCA, is a global wealth strategist, founder of the FemmeHealth Alliance, and author of The Billion Dollar Blindspot (Blindspot Press, 26 May 2026). Pre-orders are open at www.billiondollarblindspot.com