Power Shifts and Pressure Points

Why Women’s Health Belongs at the Core of Norway’s Next Chapter

- by Jeanette Kæseler Mortensen and Chelsea Ranger

As Norway begins to chart its path beyond oil and gas, the question is no longer if we need new models for economic resilience—but how we design them. At the WiLD Norway Summer Summit, leaders and thinkers gathered to tackle the twin challenges of global volatility and domestic sustainability, with one powerful thread emerging: we cannot build a future-fit Norway without placing women’s health and leadership at the center of our transformation.

From carbon transitions to caregiving burdens, women disproportionately absorb the costs of systemic blind spots. Yet, when equipped and empowered, women don’t just fill leadership roles—they reshape what leadership looks like. The Nordic region now stands at a unique inflection point: will we replicate old systems in green wrapping, or reimagine the foundation altogether?

The Case for Women’s Health as Infrastructure

Too often, women’s health is seen as a niche or private matter. But ignoring it is costing us—economically, socially, and strategically. Research from UNFPA shows a staggering 22% productivity gain when companies invest in reproductive and sexual health in the workplace. The flip side? By failing to address issues like endometriosis, perimenopause, and fertility stress, employers are effectively leaving billions in lost output and talent retention on the table.

Norwegian society, shaped by its egalitarian ethos, has a powerful opportunity: to treat women’s health as infrastructure—as essential to economic stability as roads, energy, or broadband. Whether it’s redesigning job structures for life-stage flexibility or funding innovations in menstrual equity, prioritizing women's health will not only boost wellbeing but unlock vast reserves of human potential.

Leadership Equity is Public Health

Leadership equity is not a symbolic issue. It is a public health issue. Women make up 60–90% of the workforce in health, care, and academia, yet continue to be vastly underrepresented in leadership roles. This imbalance shapes not just who leads, but what gets researched, who receives funding, and whose health outcomes are understood—or overlooked.

In this context, Norway’s leadership pipeline in life sciences tells a worrying story: despite the talent base being female-dominated, only 13% of company chairs, 19% of CEOs, and 20% of founders are women. WiLD Norway warns that without leadership equity, even representation becomes performative, reinforcing the very dynamics that hinder systemic change.

This mirrors WiLD Norway’s concern that many current gender balance measures do not apply to 76% of the life science industry—and where they do apply, compliance is shallow or symbolic. Without sector-specific commitments to power-sharing, we risk building systems that look equal on paper but deliver unequal outcomes in practice.

At the same time, while Norway sets aside hundreds of millions of NOK to attract top international talent—especially in the wake of U.S. brain drain—we still lack data on the highly educated talent already here. Many qualified individuals, disproportionately women, remain underemployed due to opaque credentialing systems (such as NOKUT), social integration barriers, and unrealistic language demands. Without this visibility, Norway risks wasting domestic reserves of human capacity while trying to import it.

We cannot pour talent into the same pool that we are stagnating or draining. If women remain undervalued—structurally and economically—Norway risks wasting one of its greatest national advantages.

Policy pathways forward:

Set bold board diversity targets across life sciences—including private companies, research institutions, and public health institutions.
Require gender balance in grant review panels and funding boards.
Use platforms like WHIT (Women’s Health Impact Tracking) to identify care gaps and quantify the cost of inaction.
Incentivize sex-proportionate clinical trials, especially in high-burden conditions like Alzheimer’s and autoimmune disease.

Women Lead Differently, And That’s a Good Thing

Foresight research shows that women in leadership positions are more likely to lead with sustainability, long-term thinking, and stakeholder inclusion in mind. Studies by McKinsey, Harvard Business Review, and the Journal of Business Ethics all point in the same direction: gender-diverse leadership outperforms on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics, especially during times of crisis.

That insight was brought vividly to life through the four strategic scenarios presented at the summit, envisioning different futures for female leadership in the Nordics by 2030:

The Strategic Stabilizer warns us of the risks of resilience without renewal—where women are visible in crisis management roles, but systems stay blind to their realities.
The Climate Catalyst reminds us that “green” doesn’t automatically mean “equal”—the green economy could easily replicate old hierarchies without intentional inclusion.
The Disempowered Spokeswoman shows how representation without power leads to performative progress.
But The System Shifter presents a compelling path forward: where gender equity, ethical tech, and sustainable economies are co-designed—and where women lead, not in spite of their life stages, but because of them.

These aren’t predictions. They’re prompts. Blueprints. Pressure points.

From Oil Reserves to Human Reserves

For decades, Norway’s prosperity has come from what lies beneath the ground. But the reserves that will sustain us next lie in human capacity—particularly the undervalued and often invisible work of women.

As we transition away from fossil fuels, we must also transition away from rigid work models, masculine-coded leadership norms, and data-poor health systems. Investing in women’s health and leadership is not just an inclusion issue. It’s a resilience strategy. A climate strategy. A business strategy.

The Leadership We Need

As one panelist put it: "We don’t just need more women in leadership. We need leadership to look more like women.” That means systems that value care, collaboration, ethics, and adaptability—not just control, performance, and scale.

To get there, policy must follow insight:

Fund women’s health R&D as seriously as we fund climate tech.
Redesign parental leave, sick leave, and healthcare access with perimenopause and caregiving in mind.
Incentivize inclusive leadership pipelines in both the public and private sectors.
And most importantly: center lived experience in how we design tomorrow’s economy.

And in an unstable world, wellbeing is not a luxury. It’s an imperative.

Words from the Frontlines of Change

“Women’s health, women’s leadership, and gender-aware innovation must be at the very core of how Norway meets the future—not only because it’s right, but because it’s smart. The smartest countries will be the ones that fix systems, not just symptoms.

We can’t keep relying on women as the backbone of the health system while denying them space at the top. Equal representation is not just about fairness—it’s essential for real-world relevance in leadership, research, and decision-making.

Norway must lead globally, not follow. Let’s turn Nordic values into Nordic leadership—in women’s health, in innovation, and in shaping the systems of tomorrow.”

— Alfred Bjørlo, Member of Parliament, Norway