Dialogue: HER Health & Wellbeing
Women’s health is not just a medical issue. It is built on systems that were never designed with women in mind, and those systems shape everything from how conditions get diagnosed to how burnout gets dismissed.
Women spend 25% more of their lives in poor health than men. In the Netherlands, we rank 25th out of 27 EU countries on healthy life expectancy. The gaps in research, funding, and care are real. But the gaps in mental health, wellbeing, mental load, and lived experience rarely enter the same conversation — even though they are just as urgent.
That is what this afternoon is about.
Our National Women’s Health Strategy 2025–2030 marks a real step forward. But policy alone does not create lasting change. That takes connecting worlds that rarely talk to each other. The health professional, researcher, policy maker, philanthropist, corporate leader, wellbeing activist, and the woman living with an undiagnosed condition rarely sit in the same room. We think they should.
HER Collective exists to make those connections. This is our first session on health and wellbeing. It seeks to spark dialogue and action in support of an agenda and ecosystem that is growing richer, more urgent, and more contested by the day.
Our Invitation
Join us for an afternoon of honest conversation and real connections, bringing together women from healthcare, research, policy, wellbeing, media, business, and lived experience.
This is an intimate gathering. A small group of firestarters will open the afternoon with different perspectives and provocations. Then we put down the microphone and talk — all of us, together.
Our question for the afternoon:
How do we join forces to advance women’s health and wellbeing in the Netherlands — and stand behind those already leading the change?
With HER Collective exploring an international Women’s Week in Amsterdam in March 2027, we also want to look ahead: what can we build together between now and then, and where can national and international connections help elevate women’s health and wellbeing as a universal challenge and opportunity?
Contributions by:
Hanneke Takkenberg, Director, International Women’s Health Research & Innovation Center
Jayasree Iyer, CEO, Access to Medicine Foundation
Aida Bilajbegovic, Health Lead, Women Inc.
Hebe Boonzaaijer, Founder, In Flow Institute
Your hosts
Nidhi Gulati (Philips) and Selma Lemsaadi (Heal Magazine), co-leads of the HER Health & Wellbeing agenda.
About HER Collective
HER Collective is a women-led community that brings together people committed to real change. Through dialogue, collaboration, and collective action across sectors, we work on some of the most pressing challenges facing women today. Our Health & Wellbeing agenda is built on one principle: don’t change the women, change the system.