Last month, we tried something we hadn't done before.
We asked the women who lead Countable — our CEO, our CTO, our CBO, and our women board members — to post on LinkedIn in their own voices about something that matters to all of us: the measurement gap in women's health. We gave it a name, The Uncounted, and a throughline: women's health conditions are among the most underdiagnosed, underfunded, and under-measured in medicine. And closing that gap is going to take all of us.
What we didn't fully anticipate was how much would come back.
It got personal.
I'll start with myself, because it feels like the right thing to do right now as I am reflecting back on the month.
I had postpartum preeclampsia. After delivering my twins, and I went home, I felt really off. I was telling the doctors and nurses that something was wrong. Everyday I would call and tell them it was hard for me to breathe, that I wasn’t feeling right. And I was told, repeatedly, that what I was feeling was normal. That I should rest and it will resolve.
When my mom flew in to see us and walked into the house, the first thing she told me was: “you are calling 911 right now”. As my mom, she instinctively knew that something was not right with her daughter, something my doctors and nurses just couldn’t seem to see.
Turns out, I was literally drowning from the inside, and so much worse could have happened. And the people trained to help me couldn't see it.
Amongst multiple autoimmune conditions (ones that mainly affect women), I also have a condition called lipedema — a chronic, progressive disorder of adipose tissue that affects an estimated 11% of women worldwide and is almost universally misdiagnosed, most commonly as obesity. Lipedema fat is pathological. It is not responsive to calorie restriction or exercise. It is painful and is composed of tenderness and heaviness in the affected tissue that is present every day, that worsens with standing, with heat, with hormonal changes. It affects mobility, energy, and quality of life in ways that are invisible to anyone who hasn't lived it. And for most of my life, I was told to “just lose weight”.
It wasn't until recently that I had a name for what I was actually living with. There are no validated biomarkers for lipedema. No reliable diagnostic test. Just clinical observation, pattern recognition, and if you're lucky, a physician who's heard of it (and believes you). I work in molecular diagnostics and research. I have a PhD in Biomolecular Chemistry. I know what precision measurement can do. And I still spent years being told that what I was experiencing was something else, or nothing at all.
My aunt was diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer after being told for months that her distended abdomen was the result of a rib injury. One day, while trying to cook for her family (something she loved), my uncle walked in to find her barely able to stand. He took her to the emergency room immediately. My aunt was tough and she had more energy than all of us kids combined. Seeing her like that was alarming and I am grateful my uncle stood his ground at that hospital and demanded answers.
After her diagnosis, the original physician came to see her. She looked at him and said: "So this is a broken rib, huh? Next time, listen to your patient."
She went through years of chemotherapy. She didn't make it. But she was such a fighter and she lived long enough to see most of her children graduate from college, which was her greatest pride.
Ovarian cancer has no reliable early detection biomarker. CA-125, the most commonly used marker, misses roughly half of early-stage cases and can be elevated by entirely benign conditions, making it an unreliable standalone screening tool. We are still waiting for the tool that could have found it in time — in my aunt, and in the hundreds of thousands of women diagnosed every year at a stage when the options narrow dramatically.
My aunt is the uncounted. Not because she was invisible, she was loving, fierce, and unforgettable. But because the signal was there in her body, and the tools and the attention weren't good enough to find it in time.
That's what "the uncounted" means to me. And I am simultaneously proud and scared to give it a name today.
What the response told us
When our CEO, Giovanna Prout, posted about the measurement gap in women's health, we had a response from someone in her network who gave me pause: "Increasing investment in the study of women's biology and disease is going to save women's lives, often and early. It's important as it shapes how we start talking about clinical outcomes for generations ahead."
That's not a marketing message. That's someone in the field articulating exactly why this work matters and why it matters now, not eventually.
Dara Wright, who sits on Countable's board and spent decades commercializing diagnostic tools at BD, Affymetrix, Thermo Fisher, and Bio-Rad, said something that genuinely moved me: "Women's health has a measurement problem and a market focus problem. These things are connected." This is coming from someone who has lived inside the diagnostics commercialization pipeline and who knows exactly where promising applications go to stall.
And then there was Jonathan Spurgin, one of our sales development reps, who re-posted on his personal LinkedIn account:
"Seeing what preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome can do to your partner changes everything. It puts a very real meaning behind women's health — and why better tools matter."
Jonathan didn't post about that because marketing asked him to. He posted it because it was true for him. That's the village showing up — not in an organized way, but in the way that actually moves people.
Why the village argument matters
The response to this initiative reinforced something we tried to be honest about throughout the month: no single technology closes the measurement gap in women's health. And no single company should pretend otherwise.
Here's what the full stack actually looks like. It starts before the science — with recognition. Women's health conditions have been chronically underfunded and understudied, which means the biomarkers that could change diagnosis and treatment often haven't been looked for in the first place. Closing that gap requires investment, prioritization, and the willingness to ask questions the field has historically skipped.
One powerful starting point is next-generation sequencing — broad, unbiased, and hypothesis-generating. Targeted sequencing enables the scale needed to follow up on the candidates most likely to be clinically meaningful. Then comes the quantification layer, where you need to know not just whether a biomarker is present, but exactly how much of it is there, reproducibly and validation, at clinical-grade precision. That's where single-molecule PCR lives. And then the long work begins: clinical trial enrollment, regulatory review, reimbursement advocacy, and the education of a clinical community that may have never ordered this kind of test before.
Each layer is essential. Each depends on the others. A discovery without quantification is a hypothesis. A biomarker without validation is a data point. The pipeline only works when the whole village shows up.
Countable's role in that village is specific: we enable absolute quantification at the single-molecule level, accessible enough to use outside of specialized research centers, precise enough to support clinical decision-making. We do that piece as well as it can be done. And we need NGS platforms, targeted panel developers, bioinformaticians, clinical researchers, and patient advocates to do their pieces with the same rigor.
This is not humility for its own sake. It's an accurate account of how transformative diagnostic categories get built. NGS didn't transform oncology through a single platform, it really took a whole ecosystem more than a decade in the making. Women's health deserves the same sustained, collective investment and care.
What comes next
Women's Health Month ended on May 31. But the measurement problem doesn't.
Conditions like preeclampsia, endometriosis, ovarian cancer, PCOS (now called PMOS), and lipedema will still be underdiagnosed on June 1 and beyond. Biomarker pipelines for many of these conditions will stall, not just at the quantification and validation stage, but earlier, because the research investment was never there to begin with. And the patients who have spent years being told their symptoms are normal, or something else entirely, will still be waiting.
Better tools matter but this isn't only a measurement gap. It's a prioritization gap. Women's health conditions have been under-studied, under-funded, and under-taken-seriously at every stage — from basic research to clinical trial enrollment to reimbursement advocacy to the exam room where a woman is told, once again, that what she is experiencing is probably fine. The tools are one part of closing that gap. The other part is harder: it requires everyone, from investors, researchers, clinicians, policymakers, and companies, to decide that women's health deserves the same sustained attention and resources as every other area of medicine.
That's the village we actually need.
If you're a researcher working in women's health, we'd love to hear from you. Whether you're working on early detection, biomarker validation, liquid biopsy, or therapeutic monitoring: the measurement gap is real, and the tools to begin closing it exist. Reach out. Let's talk about what better measurement could unlock for your work.
And to everyone who posted, reposted, commented, and showed up this month — thank you. That's our village showing up.
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