Hidden Women: North America

This page contains information about our 2026 North American Hidden Women study. For our 2025 UK study, click here.

There’s a cost to brands not seeing their customers: a cost exacted in relevance, market share, and future growth.

We’ve spent years if not decades working to better understand different audiences that matter to our clients. Much of our work has been focused on women.

As we’ve conducted our research, we’ve witnessed whole industries default to product design and marketing that ignores, oversimplifies, or outright excludes large swathes of women. We see so many brands talk to “women” as if we all share the same path, priorities, and roles.

In 2025, we published a study that revealed the distance between the lives women in the UK were living, and which lives brands presumed they were living. For this 2026 report, we surveyed 2,700 women across North America. 

What we found is that women’s lives have continued to change: in many cases beyond recognition, and increasingly by women’s own accord. However, brands continue to strategize, design products, and organize marketing campaigns guided by outdated, static ideas about women’s needs and self-identities. As a result, large swaths of women go unrecognized and unserved.

That said, some brands are doing incredibly well seeing and connecting with women and providing immense value. Many of the brands are newer, nimbler, and wiser. They are reshaping what is possible. 

Their paths offer lessons for those caught in outdated paradigms — and cause for urgency. Because when women feel unseen by the brands they rely on, they don’t complain; they quietly disengage, before adopting the brands that recognize them.

In other words, brands that don’t see women will get left behind. This report provides a clear picture of who women see themselves as, the lives they are building, and how successful brands are seeing and supporting them.

Hidden women speak with their actions. They only stay hidden if your eyes stay closed.

Read on to access the full report.