LONDON—Women's health and sexual wellness companies in the United Kingdom and Europe are being misclassified as "adult content" providers, according to new research on the topic. This misclassification is leading to institutional debanking and account closures.
The research was produced by CensHERship and The Case For Her, two U.K.-based NGO efforts that advocate against the censorship of women across the country. The document outlining the research findings notes that businesses in this space face systemic barriers to accessing financial services, including banking.
"What we find is that misclassification, over-compliance, cultural discomfort, and outdated policy language combine to create structural barriers for women’s health innovation, and that the identified structural barriers tend to fall into two forms," the research explains.
The main structural barriers identified are "misclassification" and "misunderstanding."
Misclassification is "where women’s health and sexual wellbeing are misread as adult content. This is the most visible and well-documented form of bias." Misunderstanding is "where women’s health is overlooked as too new, complex, or unfamiliar to fit existing risk templates. These cases are harder to surface because they are often resolved quietly or never formally recorded." Some companies affected include SheSpot, a very popular brand.
"Because most financial institutions have never explicitly defined women’s health or FemTech within their risk frameworks, systems default to the nearest analogue—typically adult content, vice categories, or other 'sensitive' sectors," the report further outlines.
Both CensHERship and The Case For Her identified these companies as being hindered by outdated classification systems, cultural discomfort and unconscious bias, which can significantly impact business growth and access to essential services. The report adds the classification of these companies as "adult content" and "adult services" places them in the "high-risk sector" alongside firearms manufacturing and tobacco cultivation and marketing.
