What The FemTech?!: The Origin Story of the FemTech Industry
“Is it just women founders?”*
“Why isn’t there such a thing as MenTech?”**
“Should it even exist?”***
If you’ve heard one or more of these questions when describing your product, company, industry, or community — you might be in FemTech (and you might be tired of hearing them).
Whether it’s embraced with open arms or met with intense criticism, FemTech is more than just a catchy phrase.
FemTech is creating conversation, spurring innovation, and addressing problems head-on, which ultimately helps individuals, communities, entrepreneurs, and healthcare providers and researchers dive head first into complex issues in desperate need of creative solutions.
In the first entry in the “What the FemTech?!” series, I get into the history of the naming of FemTech, the incredible impact this 7-letter moniker has had in the 4 short years since its official “launch”, and how this $50 billion by 2025 industry is anything but niche.
The Wikipedia Entry Heard Around the World
I wonder if phrase-coiner Ida Tin had a clue (pun intended) of what impact “FemTech” would have when, coinciding with the launch of the period tracking and fertility app Clue in 2016, she uttered the phrase now memorialized in the official Wikipedia entry:
“Femtech (or female technology) is a term applied to a category of software, diagnostics, products, and services that use technology often to focus on women’s health.”
I’m inspired most by entrepreneurs who are not just providing solutions to specific problems, but proposing a paradigm shift when looking at these problems — and FemTech does just that.
Historically, medical research has not prioritized women’s health, leading to the health and wellness of women being critically underserved. Healthcare products and services have a long history of being designed without considering the physiological differences between men and women (nevermind trans or intersexed persons), and from consumer product design to health apps, men have been used as the stand-in for the “average person”.
For example, in her book Orgasmic Leadership: Profiting from the Coming Surge in Women’s Health and Wellness Rachel Braun Scherl shares how Apple’s 2014 HealthKit tracking app, marketed as a way to look at “your whole health picture”, featured “no way to input information on period dates, let alone more granular female reproductive data.”
Considering roughly 26% of the global population is eligible for menstruation this is not just a huge oversight, but a “spectacular failure of awareness of the marketplace.”
And when the iOS 9 HealthKit update finally did include tracking options for people who have periods who did they turn to? I’ll give you a CLUE.
How do you prompt a major shift in thinking addressing inequality and unserved persons? You put a name on it.
Okay But What EXACTLY Does FemTech Mean?
Many have likened the function of coining “FemTech” to that of “feminism”, wherein an umbrella term creates a space to explore, examine, and effect change within an existing system.
Menstruation, fertility, and menopause may have been where FemTech had its roots — and is still ripe for innovation — but since its inception we’ve seen a wide range of market segments arise including: sexual health and wellness, mental health, pelvic and uterine health, brain and cognitive health, bone health, oncology, pain relief, breastfeeding, digital health services, and more.
Using the springboard of women’s health and wellness, FemTech is a vehicle to challenge the status quo, tackle taboo, and empower startups and entrepreneurs to openly question what it means, what it might mean, and what problems it solves.
Communities and organizations like FemTech Focus, FemTech Collective, Femtech Insider, Women of Wearables, and The Femmys (the first ever awards for excellence in FemTech) are just a few resources for those who are curious about or entrenched in FemTech and part of the bigger dialogue for the shifting definition of FemTech.
Nascent But Not Niche
Some have called for the term FemTech to be sent the way of the dodo, arguing that it makes women’s health appear niche. But does naming something directly correlate to its size and impact?
Here’s where I get confused in this line of thinking: why don’t we think about FemTech the same way as, say, FinTech, which has been around since 1971-ish (depending on who you ask).
“But EVERYONE interacts with financial technology,” you might say.
To that I’ll quote the FemTech Focus tagline, “Women’s health is everyone’s health.”
There’s the obviously huge market size, with women making up 50% of the world’s population; but FemTech goes far beyond solutions for those who identify as female. For example: infertility doesn’t just affect the individual trying to get pregnant; and someone having to miss work or school because of menstruation, PCOS, or endometriosis affects the whole company or community.
FemTech startups are bringing new and nascent technologies and solutions to a large and diverse consumer base, solving problems that have been there for decades, but were long ignored.
So What’s Next?
Will we start to see more funding pouring into FemTech from investors?
How do industries like SexTech, BioTech, and Data Security intersect with FemTech?
What conversations about intersectionality and gender equality do we need to have to make this industry better?
What challenges does FemTech have when it comes to marketing that aren’t faced by other industries?
Is there a point at which the advocacy and de-tabooing work FemTech does eventually makes the industry obsolete?
I, for one, am excited to see how FemTech — its definition, industry, and community — continues to evolve and shift.
Join me for my ongoing “What The FemTech?!” blog series as I dive head-first into the critical questions facing the complex world of FemTech.
* Nope
* ( shakes fist at the heavens, PATRIARCHY HURTS US ALL!)
*** Please read all above
