Not Just Who, But Why: Gender Insights That Should Shape Telehealth Marketing Messaging

By: Tim Duer

As telemedicine reshapes the landscape of care access, it’s doing more than expanding convenience, it’s revealing fundamental differences in how distinct populations approach sensitive health decisions. This divergence is incredibly evident in the rapidly growing commercial sexual health industry, where gendered motivations for virtual-only care models mirror larger shifts in healthcare consumerism.

Our latest update to the Causeway Solutions predictive healthcare consumer models reveals two distinct audiences likely to engage in telemedicine-only consultation – with notable differences between male and female audiences.  While there are a number of unique insights that can be identified, the clearest difference was in the age of these two audiences.   Men willing to use a telehealth-only consultation for sexual health were distributed across all age groups, including more than 25% of the male audience being above 55 years old.   By contrast, the female audience was clearly most represented in the ages of 25-44, with only 0.4% of the audience age 55 or older!  This isn’t simply a demographic variance; it offers perspective on the evolving drivers of care for individuals.

Care That Connects: Digital Health as a First Choice for Younger Women

In the modeled female audience totaling more than 21.8 million individuals nationwide, the dominant group is age 25-44, accounting for more than 80% of the overall audience.   Amazingly, only 0.5% of this entire audience is age 55 or older.

Unlike the traditional narrative, most of these women are not turning to telemedicine out of convenience.  Causeway’s Driver of Care modeling indicates that 42% of the overall audience identify connection with care team or bedside manner as the primary driver for provider choice.  In turn, they are much less likely to utilize retail health clinics and are also less likely to believe that a Primary Care Provider is a necessity.

In short – these younger women are looking for a better healthcare experience and are willing to use a virtual platform to find it.

For these women, telemedicine isn’t about avoiding in-person visits.  Instead, it’s a strategic choice to access higher-quality, more empathetic, and specialized care that’s often absent locally.

Platforms like Midi Health have emerged in response to this demand. Focused on perimenopause and women’s hormonal health, areas historically neglected by the traditional system, online providers deliver virtual access to real clinicians with niche expertise. The rapid growth of these platforms signals a powerful message: digital care is not a fallback for the millennial female patient, but is becoming a first choice, especially when on a topic like sexual health where many have felt to be underserved by legacy systems. 

Causeway’s modeled data supports this digital connection, identifying the audience to be more than 2x more likely to use the Hulu streaming service than national consumers.  Other modeled findings agree with the willingness to take the extra steps needed to seek the best care for themselves by being 20% more likely to travel out of market for care and 11% more likely to seek a 2nd opinion compared to national norms.

Convenience and Control: How Men Approach Telehealth for Sexual Health

In contrast, the male audience of individuals willing to use a telemedicine only platform for sexual health consultation is much more distributed across all ages.  Even in the older generations where it is often presumed that telemedicine is less appealing, more than 26% of this audience made up of men aged 55 or older.  Compared to national norms, these men are more likely to correspond with convenience as their primary driver of care selection, with markedly lower emphasis on provider connection.

Overall, for men of all ages, the appeal of telemedicine appears to lie in its convenience and ability to create emotional distance from topics many still find difficult to discuss in face-to-face interactions: erectile dysfunction, testosterone deficiency, or general sexual health concerns.

This helps explain the rise of platforms like Hims, which has built a substantial market around discreet access to treatment for conditions such as these, where men are less likely to discuss them openly. A quick, streamlined, and less personal process capitalizes on the likelihood that many men are more willing to address sensitive health issues when the encounter doesn’t feel like a traditional medical visit.

Causeway’s audience modeling shows this group to be more likely to consider themselves to have good physical health and less likely to feel that a PCP is necessary.  The desire for unconnected care is also reflected in the use of retail health clinics; in contrast to the females willing to use telemedicine for sexual health, these men are much more likely to turn to retail health options for other healthcare needs.  

Different Drivers, Same Goal

What these two audiences seem to have in common is a desire for agency in individual healthcare management. Each is using telemedicine to reclaim some element of control: women, to access better care; men, to bypass discomfort. This tells us something crucial about the future of healthcare engagement. It's not just about who the medical community believes is in need of care - it's about how individuals want to engage with it, and why.

Meaningful engagement with healthcare consumers requires moving beyond traditional demographic profiling. Sophisticated segmentation must account for belief systems, access preferences, and emotional drivers; all of which contribute to predictive behavioral intent.  It demands insights into the multi-faceted aspects of individual beliefs about the systems - factors that can’t be captured by age or ZIP code alone… and certainly not gender.  More sophisticated audience segmentation and more prescriptive messaging will increasingly depend on nuanced considerations regarding individual predictive behavioral intent … what consumers are really trying to solve for when they seek and choose care options. 

In this light:

• A woman choosing a telemed platform like Midi Health isn’t just avoiding the waiting room—she’s pursuing a caring provider in a historically underserved field.

• A man logging into a service like Hims may not be avoiding care altogether—he’s choosing a mode that feels less judgmental and more in his control.

These are not traditional marketing personas. They are real insights about what healthcare consumers value today: agency, dignity, and relevance.

The future of healthcare marketing won’t be built on generalized assumptions. It will be built on understanding why people make the choices they do, and designing systems that meet them where they are.