"How are you?" "Fine!” by Youth Ambassador – Youth Voices: Angela Bösen (EN)

The Youth Voices is an initiative created to amplify young people’s perspectives on gender equality, offering them a space to engage directly with the Forum’s activities and global conferences, and to bring their own voices, insights, and lived experiences into the conversation.

For the 2025 edition, the Forum chose to put young people firmly in the spotlight, inviting them to share their reflections on selected panels* they attended and the ideas that resonated most with them.

This article is written by Angela Bösen, a Youth Ambassador of the Women’s Forum, who reflects on her personal experience and perspective on health, and how it intersects with the lived experience of being a woman.

*Panel of reference:

Breaking Taboos – The Road to Accessible & Inclusive Health

Ensuring everyone has access to quality healthcare requires more than innovation – it demands a shift in mindsets and the courage to break taboos and deeply rooted inequalities. This series of conversations brings together global leaders in philanthropy, healthcare, and business to explore how early detection, inclusive policies, and corporate engagement can transform access to care. How can we help change mentalities, create supportive spaces, and drive systemic change for better health outcomes?

Moderator: Francesca Donner, Editor-in-chief of The Persistent
Dr. Aiysha Malik, Mental Health Specialist
Ines Leonarduzzi, Founder of Digital for the Planet
Teresa Barreira, Chief Marketing Officer at Publicis Sapient
Lucy Kallin, Executive Director at Catalyst

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How quickly do we respond to this question, every day, in the corridors, in our offices? Why is it so hard to talk about what we are experiencing? Francesca Donner asks.  From puberty to motherhood to menopause, women and girls are too often quick to minimize their pain and discomfort, or for it to be overlooked entirely.

Historically, women’s pain gets disregarded. If you visit a doctor with severe menstrual pain, the problem is often dismissed with the prescription of a birth control pill. And that pill is easily swallowed with a non-debated list of endlessly negative symptoms. Endometriosis is a term that only came out in recent years, in large part due to the gaps in research about women’s health.

Not only are women’s health concerns studied less than men’s are, but medical research often operates on a male default, resulting in inaccurate assumptions and conclusions about how a disease or condition affects the human body. A telling example is how the public is well informed about symptoms for heart attacks in men but ignore the specific symptoms that apply to women (Source).

I was a 20-year-old student when I collapsed at university due to the worst period cramps imaginable, which led me to being escorted from the seminar by an ambulance after the lecturer called 112. After a few hours in the hospital, the doctors sent me home without any answers, as they reportedly found nothing. In the following years, I consulted an alternative medical practitioner at my parents’ costs, listened to health podcasts and joined a self-help group for endometriosis. Luckily, I am now more or less pain-free, and I am happy to engage in open conversations with other women about menstruation, nutrition and related medication tips. Whenever a restroom lacks supplies, I am quick to offer my spare pad to any woman or girl I encounter, in an effort to combat social stigmas against menstruation.

The reflex to hide discomfort for women does not just begin with menopause – it manifests already when hiding a tampon in your hand on the way to the loo and can continue with covering while breastfeeding as a mother.

Ines Leonarduzzi turns the spotlight on her experience in a restaurant. When she was breastfeeding, the waitress told her she could use the toilet, so she wouldn’t have to feel embarrassed. Ines was surprised as she felt far from embarrassed: to her it was only natural to be feeding her baby. She also shared how much research she had to undergo by herself when experiencing struggles breastfeeding her second child in lack of clear answers or instructions from doctors.
Motherhood should not isolate, and when we address taboos, we break isolation of women and their health concerns.
The topic of menopause and perimenopause is discussed on more than one panel, it’s obviously at the forefront of the 2025 Global Meeting’s conversations on health. The coinciding time frame of both menopause and career peak is striking: most people reach higher management positions in the age range of 45 to 50, which is exactly when on average women start being affected by peri-menopause symptoms (Source 1).

Business has been a man’s world, and women fit in without having adapted structures to their needs. But that’s exactly what the Women’s Forum panelists do not accept: we need more structural and management change, not individual burden.

Lucy Kallin, Executive Director at Catalyst, stresses that 84 % of women want their workplace to show more support for menopause (Source 2). All panelists agree that we need to normalize it:  half of the population goes through menopause, yet women keep shying away from addressing it at their workplace.

Why does this happen? As a condition that presents itself at an older age, it seems too risky to share this with managers or colleagues. Women fear suddenly be labeled as “old”, which, in our performance culture, linked numerous negative associations, especially regarding employability. Naturally, exposing oneself on such a topic brings a fear of judgement. The panelists therefore call for managers and leaders to create space at work for this topic.

Being allowed to address your pain without risking negative consequences is crucial for one’s mental health.

Mental health specialist Dr. Aiysha Malik stresses that mental and physical health go together and impact one another. This is especially important when taking a holistic approach to health. Another crucial result of a more open conversation is the knowledge we share when talking about it: one important message on the panel is how necessary our expansion of knowledge about our own health experiences is.

Teresa Barreira, Chief Marketing Officer at Publicis Sapient, has experienced three different health care systems throughout her lifetime in Portugal, Canada, and the United States. She shares how she went to the doctor with symptoms of perimenopause, and the doctor, who was even a woman, told her: “There is nothing to do about it.” No response to a woman in pain. This shall not happen again.

Normalization of what we experience is key. Nobody should deal with health issues alone.  And the more we exchange, the more we can share and grow our individual and collective wisdom. From endometriosis, to breastfeeding issues, to menopause – how do we take women’s pain seriously? And how do we make sure to not belittle our own selves with it?  Let’s share knowledge and encourage others to act on it. 

When we look at breast cancer, it becomes very clear that women speaking up has helped tremendously in the development in research and awareness of society. The access and affordability of health care is the last and crucial aspect the panel discussed. It includes both physical and mental health care because one is intertwined with the other. Technology gives a positive outlook. It can be a grandiose enabler of solutions of care. Publicis Sapient has released their documentary called “Doc Albany” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2025. The documentary casts a ‘human face’ to structural inequalities and follows two physicians working in rural Georgia to highlight the gaps in healthcare access across underserved U.S. communities. The film also shows how technologies like AI and smarter data platforms can help connecting providers to patients and communities in such kind of health deserts. (Source)

Francesca Donner concluded the panel with this hopeful outlook on emerging technologies and experts who priorities humanity and the needs of communities and homes. With this, and a more courageous approach to ask, to share, and to care, in our daily interactions, we can change a lot in someone’s life.