The Country Winning at Women's Health Does One Thing Differently

The world's number-one country for women's health runs one system that everyone is in, and that single choice explains the ranking.

For five straight years, one country has ranked first in the world for women's health.

Taiwan.

The ranking comes from the Hologic Global Women's Health Index, the largest dataset of its kind, built with Gallup on surveys of 145,000 people across 144 countries. In the fifth edition, released March 17, 2026, Taiwan scored 69 out of 100 — the highest in the world, and the top spot every year since the Index launched.

It tracks what women actually report. Whether they were screened. Whether they can cover their basic needs. Whether they feel safe.

The global average is currently 54 — unchanged from Year 1.

No country cleared 69. The United States placed 13th. The United Kingdom, 48th. So the question isn't who ranks first. It's the one thing Taiwan does that the wealthier systems below it don't.

Everyone is in the same system.

Taiwan runs a single-payer program, National Health Insurance, launched in 1995. It covers more than 99% of residents. Premiums scale with income, so coverage is universal but the wealthy pay in more. One pool, everyone in it.

That single choice makes all the difference, because it removes the thing that breaks women's health everywhere else: a woman's access to screening doesn't depend on her employer, her marital status, or whether she can actually pay the bill.

Now look at the rest of the world.

Globally, 1.5 billion women — more than half of all women and girls aged 15 and older — weren't tested for cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, or an STI in the past year. The gains that did happen clustered among older women in wealthy countries. Low-income settings stayed flat.

Almost everywhere, access tracks the ability to pay. Taiwan built a system where it doesn't.

The big key difference is also screening. When everyone's in the same system, preventive care stops being a specialized procedure you seek out, get referred for, and pay to reach.

It becomes routine.

Cancer screening, tumor-marker panels, and prenatal care are folded into ordinary care and reimbursed nationally, not gated behind cost or symptom thresholds.

In the US, a single screening test can run hundreds of dollars, and insurers often demand specific symptoms or a referral first — friction that pushes early detection away from the people who need it most. Taiwan inverts the default: the system assumes you'll be screened and removes the reasons you wouldn't.

Maternal care runs on the same logic. Since 1995, Taiwan has delivered prenatal care through the national system rather than a patchwork of clinics, letting expectant mothers seek care across providers without the insurance-status barrier that suppresses use elsewhere. When care is the path of least resistance, more women take it.

Then comes the part that matters most for anyone building in women's health. One system produces one dataset.

The National Health Insurance Research Database captures detailed claims for nearly the entire population, and it's become one of the most-used resources in the world for population-level women's health research — powering studies on cervical cancer screening gaps, maternal access, and more. That's the compounding advantage.

Universal coverage produces universal data, and universal data reveals exactly where care fails and for whom, which is the only way to fix it. Most countries can't answer basic questions about their own women's health outcomes, because the data is scattered across private insurers and disconnected systems. Taiwan can.

And yet even Taiwan hasn't solved everything. It leads on what the Index measures — screening, access, preventive care, basic needs — but it is not a documented leader in perimenopause and menopause care. That absence is the point, because no country is.

The Index doesn't rank a menopause winner. By 2030, more than a billion women will be in perimenopause or menopause, and no national system anywhere has built midlife hormonal care into routine coverage the way Taiwan built in screening. The best-performing country in the world still has this gap. Everyone does. It’s currently an open field.

Which is where the smart money comes in. Taiwan didn't get these results by caring more about women than other countries do. It got them by building one system that reaches everyone. That's the same thing femtech investors are now betting on.

The biggest rounds aren't going to tracking apps. They're going to companies built into how care is actually delivered — with FDA clearances, hospital contracts, and deals with insurers.

Maven Clinic is the clearest example. It didn't grow by selling to women one at a time. It grew by partnering with employers and health plans. Investors have figured out on their own what Taiwan already proved: what improves women's health is being part of a system that pays for care, not building a better app.

For a founder, this points to what works and what doesn't. A better app won't move these numbers. Being built into a system that pays for care, and reaches people whether or not they can afford it, will.

No startup can build a national health system. That's a job for governments, and most won't take it on anytime soon. But a company can borrow the part that makes Taiwan work. Care that's integrated. Care that reaches people by default. Care that generates real data as it goes. Some companies are building exactly that. Most are just making another tracking app. The difference is the whole game.